Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - * Microsoft ended extended support for Windows Server 2003 on July 14, 2015. You can still move a Windows Server 2003 VM to Azure, and receive assistance in troubleshooting issues that concern running Windows Server 2003 on Azure. However, this support is limited to issues that don't require OS-level troubleshooting or patches. You can create a Windows Server 2003 Azure VM from specialized VHD only, not from generalized (Syspreped) VHD. You can create and upload  specialized VHD  only for your own use, including situations in which those images contain updates resulting from a custom support agreement. You will need your own Windows Server 2003 license, and it must be valid. The Azure VM agent and extensions do not support Windows Server 2003 -  Microsoft Support * When you use a specialized VHD to create a new VM, the new VM retains the computer name of the original VM. Other computer-specific information is also be kept and,...

This Week I Learned - * Azure Availability Zone & Azure confidential computing  are among the newest features to be introduced. * Azure Container Service and Azure Service Fabric run on Virtual Machine Scale Sets. * ..the growing availability of high-calorie, nutrient-poor foods is generating a new type of malnutrition, one in which a growing number of people are both overweight and undernourished.obesity has been an unexpected side effect of making inexpensive processed food more widely available. Part of the problem, he added, is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food. As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans — the building blocks for many industrial food products.For a growing number of nutritionists, the obesity epidemic is inextricably linked to the sales of packa...

This Week I Learned - *  B-Series is a new Azure VM family that provides the lowest cost of any existing size with flexible CPU usage . *  Map of Azure & AWS data centers *  AWS Quick Start reference deployments , part of the  AWS Architecture Center  help you rapidly deploy fully functional software on the AWS Cloud, following AWS best practices for security and availability. An AWS CloudFormation template automates the deployment, and a deployment guide describes the architecture and implementation in detail. Quick Starts are modular and customizable; you can layer additional functionality on top or modify them for your own implementations. *  JSON2Table  can show JSON content as a HTML table and in treeview format. *  json2html is an open source javascript library that uses JSON templates to convert JSON objects to HTML. *  A Computer Science degree isn’t required for Google's software engineering or product manager roles....

On an Azure VM the SYSTEM disk is deployed on the C: drive. The D: drive is temporary. This means that when you shut down a VM, anything you stored on that disk in your session would be lost. This D: drive could be used for things like page files. By default the E: drive is used for the DVD drive by Azure. The data disks on your VM start at drive letter F: and goes up from there (G:, H:, I:, etc.). This is where you would store data files .

This Week I Learned - *  The Azure Portal may not tell you everything. RTFM - To convert an existing Azure Traffic Manager profile to geographic routing type , you first need to associate geographic regions to all its endpoints using the Azure Traffic Manager REST API before changing the routing type to geographic. If using portal, first delete the endpoints, change the routing method of the profile to geographic and then add the endpoints along with their geographic region mapping. *  Traffic Manager is only eligible for use with App Services (formerly known as Azure Websites and Azure Mobile Services) at the 'Standard' level or above. If you downgrade your App Service to the Free or Basic tiers, it shows as 'stopped' in Traffic Manager * Azure Traffic Manager can provide failovers under 10 seconds after an endpoint goes unhealthy * You can view, add, edit and remove files to be hosted in Azure Web App using the Kudu service Dashboard & just the browser. ...

A comparison of Azure Site Recovery and other DR strategies from the Microsoft Ignite session  " Migrate and disaster recover Azure workloads " click on image for enlarged view

This Week I Learned - * Azure Container Instances are billed per second *  Managed disk support for "Azure to Azure DR" scenario using Azure Site Recovery is currently not supported.   Recovery points are generated every 5 minutes. On top of that, if you select the "latest (lowest RPO)" option during Test Failover or Failover, the RPO will be even lesser.  Site Recovery takes advantage of the Azure network infrastructure that connects regions to keep RTO and RPO very low. *  Web App Checklists to bookmark *  CloudPassage  provides an automation platform, delivered via software as a service, that improves security for private, public, and hybrid cloud computing environments. *  US President Donald Trump wiped off close to $5.7 billion through a single tweet wiped from the stock value of Amazon for a brief period. The US President had tweeted on Wednesday that the company was ‘doing great damage to tax paying retailers’ . * Infosys founders ...