Azure Tech Consultant
TL;DR: You can flip an existing ExpressRoute circuit from Standard (or Premium) to Local in minutes, but you’ll need to hop out of the Azure portal and run a couple of Az PowerShell commands. Here’s how we did it. Why bother with the Local SKU? If that sounds like your use-case, read on. The official word Microsoft’s docs spell it out: you can’t make this change in the portal. Use PowerShell or…
In many organisations, there is a need to map Azure Files shares to Windows virtual machines without deploying a traditional file server or a fully-fledged Entra Domain Services (Azure AD Domain Services) environment. One efficient and secure method is to use the system-assigned managed identity on your Azure VM. This approach eliminates the need to store credentials on the VM and ensures that…
I have a user assigned managed managed identity in Azure called TestMI . I want to give this managed identity permissions to run Microsoft Graph PowerShell cmdlets. As a managed identity in Azure, this appears under enterprise applications in Entra. Normally with the old service principals, as these appeared under app registrations, you d simply go into the Azure portal and navigate to API…
The Azure billing landscape is a labyrinthine one, with its share of twists, turns, and, occasionally, dead ends. For the uninitiated, the path through this maze is fraught with confusion, especially when it comes to optimising costs with Azure Savings Plans and Reserved Instances (RIs). This post aims to clear the fog and elucidate the sequence and strategy for applying these cost-saving…
I get asked this all the time, how do I become a successful partner in the eyes of Microsoft ? You can either have a look here https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/ or below for a summary. Solutions Partner designations The Microsoft Cloud Partner Program offers Solutions Partner designations, which are aimed at demonstrating an organisation s broad technical capabilities and…
Difference between Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Customer Agreement (MCA) Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) The Microsoft Enterprise Agreement (EA) is a three-year commitment-based volume licensing agreement for commercial organizations signing a new enrollment with 500 or more users/devices and government organizations with 250 or more users/devices. EAs offer a number of…
Default routes in Azure can be anything like forced tunneling and advertising 0.0.0.0/0 from on-prem, BGP based NVAs inside of Azure vWAN hubs, or a FW in the vWAN hub. Here s how it compares across both Azure vWAN and the traditional Azure vNets. Azure vWAN uses the concept of connections, which connects vNets to vWAN hubs and is where you configure the routes. Whereas traditional vNets make use…
Ways that you can save money on Azure. Reservations You can scope a reservation to a subscription or resource groups. Setting the scope for a reservation selects where the reservation savings apply. When you scope the reservation to a resource group, reservation discounts apply only to the resource group—not the entire subscription. Single resource group scope — Applies the reservation discount to…
The Repo This blog focuses on this repo: https://github.com/marckean/Terraform-Azure-Virtual-WAN-no-Azure-Firewall Overview Multi-environment (Prod / Non-Prod / Shared Services) using Azure Virtual WAN, with 3 vWAN hubs in the same region to provide total isolation of the network. This focuses on the Azure side of things, as a second step to this, you would connect to this from on-prem using…
I had an enterprise customer that needed to setup a multi-environment (prod/non-prod) Azure network that also comprised of a separate Shared Services. The customer needed complete isolation between the Azure prod/non-prod vNets. The Azure Shared Services vNet had to be accessed as a direct connection from the Azure prod/non-prod vNets, but also could be accessed from on-prem directly if needed.…