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• Free Learning Resources for Microsoft Virtualization & Private Cloud

  In the last little while as we have started to deliver the IT Virtualization Boot Camps as well as go out to various user groups and talk about the Microsoft Virtualization and Private Cloud offerings, I have often been asked where IT Pros can find resources to learn about how our products work, especially by those individuals who are familiar with VMware but not so much with Hyper-V and System Center.  Here are some that I would recommend: Microsoft Virtual Academy Microsoft Virtual Academy is a great place to learn all about our offerings as well as get points for completing courses, and also asses your knowledge through online assessments. Best of all, it is FREE and continues to offer new courses on a regular basis.  It has many courses including those to help VMware professionals get a better handle on Microsoft Private Cloud technologies, as well as allowing those that have begun to work with Hyper-V and System Center to dive deeper and gain a better understanding of how to get even more out of their infrastructure.  Courses that I would recommend are Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals - The Platform – This course provides IT Pros familiar with VMware with foundational understanding of how Hyper-V works as well as helps to clarify some of the changes in terminology between the two platforms. Microsoft Virtualization for VMware Professionals – Management – In this course you will learn how the System Center suite of products can be leveraged to provide an overall management solution that incorporates the physical infrastructure, virtual machines, as well as applications running within your virtual environments.  You will also learn how to leverage System Center to manage your entire virtualization platform including Hyper-V and VMware. Configuring and Deploying Microsoft’s Private Cloud – This is a new course providing a soup to nuts roadmap on how to deploy all the elements that make up Microsoft’s Private Cloud technologies from Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V to System Center 2012 components including Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator and more.  If you want to get the complete picture, this is for you! There are also many other courses available at Microsoft Virtual Academy on such topics as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), high-availability, Windows Azure,  and more.  Check out the complete list and start your learning. Free 2-Day Online Course: Creating and Managing a Private Cloud with System Center 2012 Jump Start (Feb 21 & 22) It’s not very often that you get a chance to learn from experts on a topic for two whole days absolutely free!  This is why I was really happy to learn that you can register and attend a free two-day online course on Microsoft’s Private Cloud technologies taking place Feb 21 & 22.  The course is a “Jump Start”, which means it covers a lot of ground quickly but definitely worth the time investment.  The course is designed to provide a fast-paced and technical understanding of how and why Microsoft’s approach to the private cloud delivers scalability, security, flexibility and control. Here are few unique benefits of this course: Students have the opportunity to learn from and interact with the industry’s best cloud technologists! This high-energy, demo-rich learning experience will help IT Professionals understand why Microsoft private cloud solutions are making a splash in the industry. Students will see with their own eyes how Windows Server 2008 R2 and System Center 2012 work together to provide the best combination of security and scale. Information-packed agenda! Day one of this two-day online course will focus on designing and deploying the right solutions for your organization, while day two will provide an in-depth look at the tools available to help monitor, secure and control the operational aspects of a private cloud. I encourage you to register for the course and invest in your future. Play with the Bits in Your Own Lab One of the best ways to learn about a technology is to actually get your hands on it.  Thankfully, all of the pieces of the Microsoft Virtualization Platform and Private Cloud can be downloaded from a single location (no wondering where to find each piece).  Here you can get Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 as well as the System Center 2012 RC builds, including a unified installer to make the whole process of getting things up and running easier.  No need for a TechNet subscription – just get the bits to start evaluating Microsoft’s Private Cloud technologies in your own lab.   Don’t Forget About Free Online Resources on TechNet As always, TechNet remains a great place to find videos, articles as well as links to blogs and whitepapers on virtualization and Private Cloud.  If you have not already done so, bookmark the TechNet page and visit often for the most recent technical resources to help you grow in your career. Posted Friday, January 27, 2012 8:30 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Career, TechNet Info, Virtualization, System Center, Azure, Windows Server 2008 R2, Hyper-V, VMware, training, Windows Azure, MVA, Learning

• We’ll be right back after this break…

  Hello folks, Today started very very early, we were leaving the hotel for the conference center a 5:30am…  yes, 5:30am.  however we had a great view from the hotel window. we were onsite at the Montreal Palais des Congres, to put the finishing touches on our Keynote presentation.  This morning, we tried something a little different.  we put together something a little special. not the usual keynote.  We put together a role playing experiment with our stars.  Our local Microsoft Regional Director, Guy Barrette, our local developer evangelist Frederic Harper, and Rick Claus our IT pro evangelist.   We lived through a simulation of a real world IT problems that a lot of enterprises are facing these days. Old ASP.Net applications, obsolete servers, misconceptions about cloud computing to name a few… The formula was very well received by the attendees since it provided real, to the point answers and live demos of the Microsoft Azure capabilities from the IT pro perspective, the developer perspective and the solution architect perspective.   TechDays 2011 Montreal is off to a great start.  Great attendees, fantastic speakers, awesome content and extraordinary partners. you can see all the pictures as we upload them on our Flickr group. http://www.flickr.com/groups/techdays/pool Cheers!! Pierre Roman, MCITP, ITIL | Senior Technical Account Manager | Directeur de Compte Technique Senior IT Pro blog | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn Posted Tuesday, November 29, 2011 12:37 PM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: TechDays_ca, Pierre Roman, Azure, Conferences, Cloud

• De retour après la pause….

  Salut, La journée a commencé de bonne heure ce matin… 5 :30am.  voici la vue de ma chambre…  oui oui c’est le matin… Nous étions sur place tôt pour donner la touche final à notre présentation principale. Cematin à TechDays 2011 Montréal, nous avons eu la chance de faire une expérience un peu spéciale. Un Jeu de rôle avec en vedette, notre vedette locale, Guy Barrette, notre évangéliste local aupres des développeurs Frederic Harper, et Rick Claus un de nos évangéliste aupres des professionnels en TI.     Une simulation d’une problématique à laquelle beaucoup d’entreprises font face. Des applications ASP.net des serveurs désuets et une mauvaise perception du « Cloud Computing », oops, de l’infonuagique. (Un terme que j’ai appris ce matin).       Une formule bien appreciée des participants et définitivement un très bon survol des capacités de Microsoft Azure. Beaucoup de participants, des présentateurs hors-pair, du contenu de valeur, des partenaires en or…. Un très bon début pour TechDays 2011 Montréal. vous pouvez voir toutes les photos sur notre groupe Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/groups/techdays/pool   A + Pierre Roman, MCITP, ITIL | Senior Technical Account Manager | Directeur de Compte Technique Senior IT Pro blog | Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn Posted Tuesday, November 29, 2011 11:53 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: TechDays_ca, Pierre Roman, Azure, Conferences, Cloud

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App: Part 6 - Taking Down the Application

  If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account Part 3: Configuring the Service Package Part 4: Configuring the Hosted Service, Deploying the Package, and Testing Part 5: Promoting from Staging to Production  Since this deployment is for learning purposes only, we need to make sure that we take down the deployment so as to make sure that your credit card won’t be billed. Dropping the SQL Azure Database From the Windows Azure Management Portal, click on Database in the left hand navigation. In the left hand top navigation, expand the subscription under which you created the SQL Azure database server and database. Expand the SQL Azure database server and highlight the NerdDinner database. Click Drop from the ribbon. You’ll be asked if you want to drop the database. Click Drop. The database has now been dropped. IMPORTANT: Once a database is dropped, it can’t be restored. In a real scenario, make sure that the database you select to drop is, in fact, the database you want to drop. Dropping the SQL Azure Server Select the server node in the left hand top navigation. Click Drop from the top toolbar. You’ll be asked if you want to drop the server. Click Drop. The database server has now been dropped. IMPORTANT: Once a database server is dropped, it can’t be restored. In a real scenario, make sure that the server you select to drop is, in fact, the server you want to drop. Deleting the Storage Account Click on Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN from the left hand bottom navigation. Click on Storage Accounts (X) (where X is the number of storage account that you have provisioned) from the left hand top navigation. From the right hand list, expand the subscription under which you provisioned the storage account. Click on the account you provisioned earlier. Click Delete Storage from the top ribbon. You’ll be asked if you’re sure you want to delete the storage service. Click Yes. The storage account has now been deleted. IMPORTANT: Once a storage account is deleted, the account and everything stored in it is deleted and it can’t be restored. In a real scenario, make sure that the account you select to delete is, in fact, the account you wanted to delete. Deleting the Hosted Service Click on Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN from the left hand bottom navigation. Expand the subscription under which you created the hosted service. Expand the previously created hosted service. Click on the row that specifies Deployment as the type. Click Stop in the ribbon. After a few moments, the list will refresh indicating that the deployment has been stopped. NOTE: From a billing perspective, even though your deployment is stopped (i.e. no one can access the hosted service), you’ll still be billed for the compute hours. This is because your deployment is still consuming resources on the server to which it was deployed. With the deployment still highlighted, click Delete from the ribbon. You’ll be asked if you want to delete the deployment. Click Yes. IMPORTANT: Once a deployment is deleted, it can’t be restored. In a real scenario, make sure that the deployment you select to delete is, in fact, the deployment you want to delete. After a few moments, you will see that the deployment has been deleted. Click on the row that specifies Hosted Service as the type. Click Delete from the toolbar. You’ll be asked if you want to delete the hosted service. Click Yes. After a few moments, you will see that the hosted service has been deleted. With that, you’ve now removed all of the resources that you allocated during the setup the environment. Congratulations! You have successfully set up staging and production environments, deployed an application to the Cloud, and then decommissioned those environments when they were no longer required. Let’s take a step back for a moment and reflect on what we’ve done here and the ease with which we did it. We’ve proven why Cloud computing works and how IT Pros, such as yourself, now have an infinite platform on which to deploy solutions that deliver on business opportunities without the constraints of physical infrastructure and geographic location. Comments and Feedback Take a moment to share what you thought of the walkthrough, what you’ve learned, and what next steps you’ll take on your journey to the Cloud in this LinkedIn group discussion. I’ll be reading through your responses and taking your feedback as input for next walkthrough and series of events that we’ll do together. We’ll go deeper into Windows Azure concepts and explore further. Posted Monday, April 25, 2011 6:06 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Windows Azure, tutorial

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App: Part 5 - Promoting from Staging to Production

  If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account Part 3: Configuring the Service Package Part 4: Configuring the Hosted Service, Deploying the Package, and Testing  Almost done! With your testing completed, it’s now time to promote the application from the  staging environment to production. With Windows Azure, promoting from staging to production can’t be any easier. Promoting from Staging to Production In the Windows Azure Management Portal, from the Hosted Services screen, click on the Nerd Dinner v1.0 deployment. Click on Swap VIP in the ribbon. Notice, the production line is empty – which makes sense since we don’t have any production instances of the solution running. If we did, the deployment name would show and this process would effectively swap the staging version of the solution (a.k.a. the new solution that we want to put up) with the current production version (a.k.a. the solution that we want to replace). Click OK. Within a few seconds, you’ll see that the deployment shows Ready and that the environment shows Production. You’re done! Don’t believe it? Test it. Testing the Production Application Click on the Nerd Dinner v1.0 deployment and look at the DNS name in the Properties pane. It now shows the DNS name that you reserved when you created the hosted service. Click on the DNS name it to launch the solution in the browser. If you get a DNS error within the first little while after you promote the solution to production, don’t worry. Nothing has gone wrong – the subdomain just hasn’t had time to propagate to the DNS servers used by your ISP. After about 5 to 10 minutes, the solution should come up with no problems. Once you’re done testing the application and exploring all of the features and functions of the Windows Azure Management Portal, you should remove the web instance, the storage account, and the SQL Azure server and database so as to not incur any charges on your credit card. We’ll go through that next. Posted Sunday, April 24, 2011 5:29 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Windows Azure, tutorial

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App: Part 4 - Configuring the Hosted Service, Deploying the Package, and Testing

  If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account Part 3: Configuring the Service Package  Good new - updating the Service Configuration file with the storage account and database information was probably the most challenging part of the deployment. Now, it’s back to wizard-based tasks. The Hosted Service is the container of your application in Windows Azure. It breaks down into a deployment and one or more instances of roles required to run your application. In order to run the application, a hosted service is created and the application is deployed into it. Let’s get started. Creating a Hosted Service Log into the Windows Azure Management Portal. On the top ribbon, click New Hosted Service. Select the subscription under which you previously provisioned your SQL Azure server, database, and storage account. In the Service Name field, type a name for this service (e.g. Nerd Dinner). The service name will help you identify this particular service when you you have several services deployed. In Choose a URL for your service, type a subdomain name to create the URL at which your service will be available. This subdomain name must be unique among all the services, yours or anyone else's, running on Windows Azure. From the region drop down, select North Central US as that is the data centre in which the database and storage accounts reside and will therefore result in optimal performance. Click on Deploy to stage environment. It is recommended that you always deploy to the staging environment first. This will allow you to perform any kind of testing you need on the application prior to it being available for everyone to use. In the Deployment Name field, enter Nerd Dinner v1.0. It is also recommended that you give each deployment a name that describes the package you are deploying, such as a version. Click on Browse Locally under Package Location and browse to the location on your computer where you saved the deployment package provided by the developers. Select the NerdDinnerCloud.cspkg. Click OK. The CSPKG file is an encrypted file that contains all of the files that are required for deploying the application as well as the configuration information required to describe the infrastructure requirements your application needs in order to run. Click on Browse Locally under Configuration file and select ServiceConfiguration.cscfg. Click OK. As discussed previously, the CSCFG file contains additional configuration parameters that require easy access in order to be able to modify as necessary, such as the storage account and database information previously configured or the instance counter. The service configuration file will now be validated. You’re going to get a warning about only having one instance in your solution. Click Yes to override and submit your solution for provisioning. Windows Azure will now provision the instances. You can follow the provisioning status from the portal. After a few minutes, you’ll see the status as Active. Your solution is now deployed in the staging environment. A service deployed to the staging environment is assigned a URL with the following format: {deploymentid}.cloudapp.net. A service deployed to the production environment is assigned a URL with the following format: {hostedservicename}.cloudapp.net. You have now successfully deployed the application to the staging environment in Windows Azure. Before going to production, it’s always important to make sure that everything is working as it should. Testing the Solution in the Staging Environment From the Hosted Services page, click on Nerd Dinner (the one that is listed as Deployment under the Type column). In the Properties pane on the right, you’ll see its very long staging environment DNS name.  Launch the solution by clicking on the DNS name. Test the application to make sure that everything is working. Let’s go back to our to do list and see what we have to do next. Posted Saturday, April 23, 2011 6:54 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Windows Azure, tutorial

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App: Part 3 - Configuring the Service Package

  If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure Part 2: Provisioning a Storage Account  With the database and storage account created, the application has to be configured to use them. Though developers are used to placing configuration parameters in the web.config or app.config, with Cloud applications, these two files are not easily accessible. They’re wrapped into the service package that is encrypted when it’s created. For configuration parameters, such as database connection strings and storage account details, it’s best to place these in the Service Configuration file. This way, the parameters can be changed at any time and will not require the service package to be recompiled and re-uploaded. Technically you can provide the database and storage account information to the developers who can go into the service configuration file, make the changes, and then send it to you. However, in order to maintain separation of concerns (required by some regulatory bodies) and to maintain the security of the information, it is best not to share the configuration information unless absolutely necessary. The service configuration file is an XML file that can simply be edited using Notepad or your favourite XML editor. For this walkthrough, we’ll use Notepad. Let’s get started. Open the Service Configuration File Use Notepad to open the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file provided in the deployment package from the developers." Retrieve and Setting the Storage Account Information If you closed the Windows Azure Management Portal window, log back in. Click on Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN in the left hand bottom navigation. Click on Storage Accounts (X) (where X is the number of storage accounts that you have provisioned. Most likely this will be 1). In the list on the right hand side of the screen, click on the storage account previously created. Click View under Primary access key in the right hand Properties pane. If the properties pane is not visible, it may be closed. Click the arrow at the top of the closed properties pane to open it. Click on Copy to Clipboard to the right of Primary Access Key. You may receive a message from Silverlight asking if you would like to allow the application access to your clipboard. Click Yes. Click OK to return to the storage account list. With the storage account still highlighted, make note of the Account Name in the Properties pane. You’ll need that as well. Go back to your Notepad window. Locate the below in the file: Replace [AzureStorageAccount] with the Account Name noted in the Properties pane. Replace [AzureStorageKey] with the key copied to the clipboard from the Management Portal. Save. The application is now configured to use the storage services account securely. Retrieving and Setting the Database Connection Information If you closed the Windows Azure Management Portal window, log back in. Click on Database in the left hand lower navigation. Expand the subscription node under which you provisioned the SQL Azure server in part 1. Expand the SQL Azure server under which you provisioned the NerdDinner database in part 1. Click on the NerdDinner database. Click on the … button under Connection Strings in the Properties pane. A message will pop up displaying the connection string to use in the application to connect to the SQL Azure database. Since the application the developers packaged up for you is a .NET-based application, you’ll be using the ADO.NET connection string. Copy the ADO.NET connection string. Click Close. Go back to your Notepad window. Locate the below in the file: Highlight the text between provider connection string=" and " “/> and replace it with the connection string you copied to the clipboard. Make sure you don’t delete the two " tags. Find Password=mypassword in the text you pasted in. Replace mypassword with the password of the SQL Azure server provisioned in part 1. Save. The application is now configured to use the SQL Azure database. Let’s go back to our to do list and see what we have to do next. Posted Friday, April 22, 2011 6:17 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Windows Azure, tutorial

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App: Part 2 - Provisioning a Storage Account

  If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction Part 1: Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure  The architecture of the application also calls for Windows Azure storage to store some of the application’s configuration data, as well as data for the ASP.NET providers. If you’d like to find out more about Windows Azure Storage, read through the Windows Azure Storage section in Introduction to Windows Azure Platform on the Microsoft Patterns and Practices site. Let’s get started. If you’re not already logged in to the Windows Azure Management Portal, navigate to the portal and log in. From the ribbon, click on New Storage Account. Choose your subscription from the subscription drop down. Choose a unique URL prefix for your storage account. Storage accounts have unique URL prefixes under the cloudapp.net domain. You’ll need to choose a unique prefix as this is the address that allows HTTP based access to the application’s storage services and you wouldn’t want someone else accessing your storage services. As with the SQL Azure server, we need to specify a region or affinity group for our storage account. For the purposes of this walkthrough, select North Central US. Click Create to kick off the provisioning process. Within a few moments, the view will update, displaying the created storage account. That’s it for the storage account. We’ll come back to here later on in order to grab the configuration information the application will need in order to securely connect to the storage services. Let’s go back to our to do list and see what we have to do next. Posted Thursday, April 21, 2011 10:01 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Windows Azure, tutorial

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App: Part 1 - Provisioning and Configuring SQL Azure

  If you’ve started reading from this post, you’ll need to go through the previous parts of this series before starting this one: Introduction The architecture of the application calls for a SQL Azure database to store the application’s data. The developers have created the database on their on-premise development SQL Server instance and since you can’t simply detach the database from SQL Server and then attach it to the SQL Azure server, they have scripted the database for SQL Azure and have included it in the deployment package. To find out how the on-premise SQL database was scripted for SQL Azure, see the part 2 of the developer walkthrough, Scripting the On-Premise Database for SQL Azure. Let’s get started. Log in to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Once you get started with Cloud services, you’re going to be visiting this site often. I highly suggest bookmarking it or committing https://windows.azure.com to memory. In the navigation menu on the left, you’ll find the Databases button. Click on the Databases button. At the top, you’ll see a list of Windows Azure subscriptions that are associated with your Windows Live ID. Click on the subscription that will host your SQL Azure server(s) and database(s). You’ll see a listing of all the SQL servers associated with your subscription. We’ll come back to this screen later on and you’ll see it populated with server information. Provisioning the SQL Azure Server Click on Create in the Server tab group of the toolbar (located at the top of the screen). The Create Server dialog box will popup where you’ll configure your SQL Azure server. The neat thing here is that you’re actually provisioning a server as if you would in your own data centre, except you’re doing it through a wizard and the actual work of installing Windows Server, SQL Server, and configuring everything is done for you. Select a Region. Selecting a region allows you to host your database in one of several regions (data centres) around the world. This allows you to geo-locate your database servers throughout the world in order to optimize performance. For this walkthrough, select North Central US. Click Next. Now you have to create your administrative credentials so that you can log in to the database. SQL Azure uses SQL authentication, so this process is like setting up your “sa” login on an on-premise box. Choose a login that is unique. Usernames like “admin”, “administrator”, “sa”, “root”, “guest”, “dbmanager”, and “loginmaster” are not allowed – people know these logins, so to minimize any security exposure, you’re prevented from using them. Notice the red warning? I tried to use an easy password (“demo” – clearly not a strong password!). The red warning highlights the password rules that you have to use when creating a password to ensure that everything is kept secure. As soon as you enter a password that meets the rules, the warning will disappear and the Next button will become available. Click Next. Now we have to create firewall rules so that our database can be accessible. Typically, you’ll just want your application connecting to the database, so you’ll add the IP of the server that hosts your application. Similarly here, select Allow other Windows Azure services to access this server to allow the application hosted in Windows Azure to access the SQL Azure server. We’ll also need access to the database from our local machine so that we can use SQL Management Studio (or the SQL management tool of your preference). Click on Add to add a new firewall rule to the list. First things to do is to give the rule a name. The best thing to do is to give the rule a name based on the location from which you’re going to be connecting – something like “Toronto Office”. This will make it easy for you to locate the rule in the future and remember its purpose. It is recommended that you add the firewall rule right before you start working and make sure to remove it when you’re done. This just makes sure that your database(s) stay secure at all times. After naming the rule, enter the starting and ending range of the IPs that will have access to the database. Notice that your IP is shown at the bottom. If you’re creating a rule for yourself (this is what we’re doing in this walkthrough), the guess work is taken out of the equation – you can simply use the IP address shown for both the start and end range. Click on Finish. You’ll notice a little green wheel spinning. This tells you that the server is being provisioned. The server is now provisioned.   We can now see that we have one server provisioned. At a glance, we can see the server name, user, region, and the fully qualified server name. We’re going to need these later on when we connect to the server. Creating the Database Now that we have a server, the next step is to provision a database on that server. While still on the Subscription Home screen, click on Create in the Database group of the ribbon. Notice the same wizard-like approach as creating a server. Give the database a name. For this walkthrough, we’ll use NerdDinner (that’s the app that’s going to use this database). Select an edition. For the purposes of this walkthrough, let’s use the Web Edition. For more information on the differences between the editions, see the SQL Azure FAQs. Select a size. We’ll stick with 1GB for now since that’s all we need for this application. Click OK. You’ll see the green wheel spinning meaning. Like before, the provisioning process is now occurring. Once it’s done, we’ll have a database. That’s it! We now have a database. Let’s see what that database looks like. Go over the left navigation pane, and expand the subscription and then expand the server. There’s our database. Click on it. You’ll now see some information about the database in the right-hand side Properties pane. If you’re interested in the online Database Manager, click on Manage from the toolbar. You can manage the database online as well as with the SQL tools that you’re already familiar with. Connecting to SQL Azure Server In the Windows Azure Management Portal, click on the previously provisioned server. The Properties pane on the right-hand side of the screen will refresh with the server information. If, for some reason, you can’t see it, hover your mouse on the right-hand side of the screen until you see the cursor change to a two arrow cursor. Drag it towards the left and the Properties pane will appear. In order to connect to the database, we’re going to need the fully qualified DNS name of the server. Highlight the value in the Fully Qualified DNS Name and press CTRL+C. Remember, the Windows Azure Management Portal is a Silverlight application. Don’t bother trying to right-mouse click to copy because you’re just going to get the Silverlight menu. Open SQL Server Management Studio and open a new connection. Paste the server name in the Server name field. Change the authentication type to SQL Server Authentication. Enter the administrator login and password setup earlier in the Login and Password fields respectively. If you don’t remember the login, just flip back to the Windows Azure Management Portal and it will be in the Properties pane. Before we click on Connect, click on Options. We want to make sure that the connection is secure. To do that, click on Encrypt connection. Click on Connect. Give it a few seconds and you’ll be connected. Notice the icon next to the server name? The icon is blue, indicating that the connection is to a SQL Azure server. Expand the Databases node to see our NerdDinner database. Open the first of the developer provided scripts. From the File menu, click on Open, and then select File. Select InstallCommon.sql. Change the database to NerdDinner and click Execute. It should run relatively quickly and execute with no problems. Repeat steps 10 and 11 for each of the provided scripts. Don't forget to ensure that the NerdDinner database is selected before running each script. Let’s check that the tables and stored procedures were created. Expand the NerdDinner database. You should now see tables and stored procedures. That was relatively painless, right? Not too different from running scripts against your on-premise SQL Server, right? Right! Congratulations! You have now successfully deployed the SQL Azure database. Online Database Manager Let’s pause for a moment and look at a scenario where you may not have SQL Server Management Studio available to you. No problem. You can deploy the scripts from the online management console. Go back to the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the NerdDinner database, and then click on Manage in the ribbon. A new tab or window will open. It’s going to open up a new tab. If you have a pop-up blocker, it may prevent the window from opening. Allow the window to pop-up in your pop-up blocker, and click on Manage again. All the login information is pre-populated because you previously selected the database. Just enter your password and click Connect. You can do pretty much everything from here. New query, tables, etc. For example, to deploy scripts: Click on Open Query. Select a script file and click Open. Click on Execute. There you have it – deployments from anywhere! SQL Azure Deployment Completed With that, we’re done the SQL Azure portion of our deployment. Let’s review what we did: We created a SQL Azure Server. We created a SQL Azure Database. We connected to the SQL Azure database, and executed the scripts provided by the developers against it. Let’s go back to our to do list and see what we have to do next. Posted Wednesday, April 20, 2011 2:34 PM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Cloud, Windows Azure, tutorial

• Deploying a Simple Cloud App

  I’d like to take this opportunity and introduce myself, as this blog post series is my debut on the Canadian IT Professionals blog. My name is Jonathan Rozenblit (@jrozenblit). I work alongside Rick and Damir though I focus on the developer tools and platforms. Windows Azure is one of those technologies that is both an infrastructure platform and a development platform, so when it comes to Windows Azure, I’m an developer evangelist as well as an IT Pro evangelist. As I work with developers throughout the country, showing them what’s possible with Windows Azure, the conversation always comes up around environment setup, deployment, scaling, and decommissioning. Developers should know how things work; however, companies that have IT departments usually delegate Cloud services responsibilities to you, the IT Pro. As Rick mentioned here on the blog time and time again - "The Cloud is Coming" and it's best that you get in front of the ball and learn how this works in order for you to have more of a PROACTIVE conversation about cloud technologies instead of a nay-sayer reactive conversation. Position yourself as a thought leader who understands what the implications of cloud technologies are and demonstrate you already know how to leverage them. Having said that, I’d like to take this opportunity to walk YOU though the steps required to deploy an application to the Cloud. Before we get started, you’ll need a Windows Azure account, which you can get by either activating a new Windows Azure Introductory Special or a Windows Azure Pass. You can find out more about these here. In this walkthrough, we’ll deploy a simple ASP.NET MVC application that the developers have converted from an on-premise hosted application to a Cloud-ready application. What We’ll Need Here’s the deployment package prepared by the developers. You’ll need to download the package before you proceed. Here’s what we’ll need from an infrastructure perspective: 1 SQL Azure database to store the application’s data 1 Storage Account to store some of the application’s settings and provider data. 1 Hosted Service as a Web Role to host the application itself How We’re Going To Do It We’re going to: Provision a SQL Azure database server and database Provision the storage account Update the deployment package provided to us by the developers with the database and storage account configuration information Create the hosted service, deploy the application to the staging environment, and test it Promote the application from the staging environment to the production environment and test it Since this deployment is for learning purposes only, we’ll also want to make sure that we take down the deployment so as to make sure that your credit card won’t be billed. As you’re going through this walkthrough, if you run into any trouble or have any questions, feel free to send me an email. I’d be more than happy. Comments and Feedback At the end of the walkthrough, please take a moment to share what you thought of the walkthrough, what you’ve learned, and what next steps you’ll take on your journey to the Cloud in this LinkedIn group discussion. I’ll be reading through your responses and taking your feedback as input for next walkthrough and series of events that we’ll do together. Posted Wednesday, April 20, 2011 6:16 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure, Cloud, Windows Azure

• Over $4300 Raised for User Groups through the Azure Community Promotion!!

  In conversations with UG leads across the country, we heard clearly for Canada the cloud represents so many opportunities for organizations, developers and IT Pros.   After listening to the feedback, through these conversations and others from TechDays, we decided we needed to do something that drives awareness and helps grow skills.  That something turned out to be the Azure Community Promotion.   The Azure Community Promotion was launched in mid-December to allow user group (UG) community members to give back while growing their skills learning Windows Azure. For each individual that took the time to grow their skills and shared their experience, we committed to donating $25 to that user group and also send the individual a $25 gift card.  There was no limit on how many UG members could participate but all validation screenshots needed to be submitted to cdnazure@microsoft.com by Dec 31st.  Before the promotion ended, John Oxley stated in a blog post that he wanted to see us reach a goal of over $3000 by December 31st!  Well, you did it!  Through your efforts and on behalf of your user groups a total of $4325 was raised from over 170 submissions benefitting 28 user groups across the country!   What makes this result even more special is that everyone contributed at a time when family and spending time with loved ones are especially important.  The fact that many of you also chose to give back to the community and assist your local user group just shows how when we work together we can achieve so much to the benefit of many.  Our heartfelt thanks to each and every individual who took the time to try Azure and deploy an application. In the coming weeks we will be sending out gift cards to those who submitted an Azure application as part of the promotion.  We will also be contacting each of the user group leads whose groups benefited from the promotion and who were so instrumental in getting the message out to their membership and soliciting everyone’s participation to help raise some always welcome additional funds to the group.   Once again, thanks to all who participated and for raising $4325 for user groups across Canada! Damir Damir Bersinic Senior Platform Advisor, Microsoft Canada Posted Monday, January 03, 2011 10:23 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Communities, Azure, Cloud

• Cloud for the IT Pro – Give Azure a try

  During my session at TechDays Calgary about Cloud for the IT Pro, I “challenged” the Technical audience to get out there and dip their toe into the Platform As A Service world with Windows Azure. The challenge was quite simple: Sign up for the introductory FREE 25 hr trial Register and complete the provisioning process create a new instance and deploy a sample application to staging browse to the application and take a screenshot to say you’ve completed the process Delete the instance to ensure you don’t incur any additional charges. If you are able to do this – you’ve just experienced the new environment of what it would be like to provision a new web based application running on the Azure platform. You’ve also just proved that Cloud services DOESN’T have to mean that you BYPASS the IT Department – congratulations!  If you attended Calgary TechDays and you send me a copy of the ScreenShot app CLEARLY showing me the URL and your app running (rick.claus@microsoft.com) – I’ll be handing you a prize (you know what it is). If we can’t connect personally to complete the exchange (I’ll be at Coffee and Code from 11am to 5pm on December 16th here in Calgary. It’s at Second Cup, 607 8TH AVENUE SW) – include your mailing address and I will personally write you a thank you note and ship it out to you before the holidays. Now – here’s the help I promised. All the steps I outlined above are documented over on Barry Gervin’s blog. Complete with step by step and video screencasts of the process!!! It should only take you 15 minutes to do from start to finish. Barry and Object Sharp put on an Azure Fest recently in Toronto targeting developers – but hey – all the information covered applies to us IT Pros for setup and configuration of Azure and provisioning instances. You know what – I’ll even link you to a sample application (the packages and config file) for a sample application called NerdDinner. Download it local to you system, extract the files  and use it as the package and config for your application. In the video they reference their own version of the same package – you can use this one. I look forward to seeing your screenshot and satisfied that you’ve taken a step in the right direction to understand how to be PROACTIVE about talking “cloud” in your environment. Keep up the good work! IT Pro Team Blog | IT Managers Blog |Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2010 5:48 PM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: TechDays_ca, Rick Claus, Azure

• Cloud Services and IT Professionals – the prequel

  I’ve opened a can of worms with a post a couple of months back (ok – a LOT of months back – was it REALLY February?) about should IT Professionals care about Cloud Services yet and what type of cloud service would have a direct impact on IT Pros daily lives. That post had over 22 comments (albeit a big number from “mike”) prodding for more information about Privacy and Security (two very different things when it comes to cloud) and impact on things like Patriot act and other legislation here in Canada and around the world. This is not “the special post on security and privacy and all that S#&t” .  That one comes later THIS WEEK.  Yes “mike”, it’s finally almost here - months after you brought it up. The team has been busy, we’ve been planning and I’ve been talking with people inside and outside Microsoft about privacy, legislation, regulation, patriot act, security, ISO standards and the like. I’ve even been polling people on Twitter, facebook and Linked’in asking if they could give me their thoughts on their concerns on Cloud Services. Take a moment and fill out your response to this simple question: What concerns you about using “The Cloud” and hosted services? As for services that will impact IT Pros daily lives – have you checked out Windows InTune beta? It’s targeted at small and medium sized businesses for giving them a cloud based solution for anti-malware and antivirus, centralized reporting and control, software and hardware inventory and it’s independent of domain membership / workgroup membership / physical location. It’s in Beta now and was open (now closed) to the first 10,000 signups.  As of Yesterday (July 12th) it opened again (still open) for another 10,000 participants – I signed up and am using it on a dozen different PC’s and laptops I look after as the “friends and family” IT Consultant we all are. I’ll have a more detailed post on the overall experience and my thoughts on it – but I wanted to let you know it’s open once again for signups – go try it out!    IT Pro Team Blog | IT Managers Blog |Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn Posted Tuesday, July 13, 2010 8:37 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Commentary, Rick Claus, Security Bulletins Podcast, Azure

• Thinking of moving to the cloud? Get free compute time with Windows Azure

  Are you a developer looking to launch your new web application? Or perhaps you are an IT Pro or IT Architect trying to understand what “the Cloud” means to you.  Or maybe you have a need for some compute time to run some computations. Regardless of who you are, or why you are thinking about the cloud, Microsoft is making it easy for you try out Windows Azure as well as SQL Azure and AppFabric. If you visit http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/ and select the introductory special you will be able to try a limited amount of the Windows Azure platform at no charge.  This offer is available through October 31, 2010 and is limited to one per customer.  For full details and disclosure take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/offers/popup.aspx?lang=en&locale=en-US&offer=MS-AZR-0001P If you are in Canada and have question about Windows Azure, my team and I are here to help and can answer your questions.  We would love to hear what you are using Azure for.  Please feel free to email us at cdnazure@microsoft.com. Posted Wednesday, July 07, 2010 1:55 PM from Canadian IT Professionals | 0 Comments Filed under: Azure

• Real World Azure: The IT Professional’s Role and Windows Azure

  It’s obvious by the number of comments to Rick’s post, and my last post on Azure, that there are a lot of questions still on your mind in regards to cloud computing.  IT Pro Technical Evangelist Joey Snow and Senior Architect Evangelist Brian Prince are back at it again! This time Brian gives the white board a workout as he describes the Windows Azure architecture and answers questions about the IT Pro’s role. With Windows Azure, IT Pros have to deploy applications and manage their health, predict and manage demand for applications, and make sure data is backed up and secure. Brian describes the Windows Azure Platform Application Fabric and touches on SQL Azure, storage elements, blobs, queues and tables. Posted Friday, March 19, 2010 11:35 AM from Canadian IT Professionals | 1 Comments Filed under: Videocast, Rodney Buike, Azure