I'm looking at Azure Dev Box as a way for my dev team to have a self-service portal to spin up VMs for projects. Dev Box looked like a good fit for my team - however in looking deeper into the custom image part of things it looks like only Win 10/11 Ent. images are supported, however I need Win server images for my team
Any chance this will be on the roadmap to support Linux and Win server images for Dev Box? or am I reading this wrong? and there is a way? - it is not a restriction of Azure Compute Galleries - it seams that Windows 365 is involved in this Dev Box offering and it prevents the other image types.
I'm also open to other solutions that could give me the functionality.
I've looked into AVD but it is not really designed from dev user needs (ie a self-service portal, where a dev user gets a catalog of VM templates they can use and spin up VMs).
We currently use VMware vCloud Director for the dev team to work in this manner - but I want to get these workloads in Azure.
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This is a question for Azure experts, in particular around the Windows VM's available in Azure.
Do they make any changes to the base build? Hardening and security standards? Or are they standard builds fresh out the box?
Any information on this would be greatly appreciated.
yes. Public and up-to-date information about security measures like compliance, some technical details, etc, can be found on the Azure Trust Center.
However, i do not think that Microsoft reveals all of the internal implementation information, but a lot of work is doing around isolation of hypervisor, root os, guest vms. Also, there is the Azure Fabric Controller is the "brain" that secures and isolates customer deployments and manage the commands sent to Host OS/Hypervisor, and the Host OS is a configuration-hardened version of Windows Server.
Some basic information can be found here:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud/gg663906.aspx
Azure Fabric Controller: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/videos/fabric-controller-internals-building-and-updating-high-availability-apps/
And i recommend to follow Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, as his video are one of the most internal-details-revealing i ever saw.
You might wanna check out the CIS hardened Images in the Azure Marketplace: https://www.cisecurity.org/cis-hardened-images-now-in-microsoft-azure-marketplace/
Ther you can choose between two levels of hardening, depending on your workload as well as there multiple Windows Server versiosn and even some Linuxs distrubutions. If you want to harden the VMs yourself, I would check out the Dev-Sec Project on github: https://github.com/dev-sec
There you can customize the hardening to your needs if you have an automation tool in place like chef, puppet etc.
I'm running Visual Studio 2013 Premium and I've installed Microsoft Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 v 2.5. I'm signed in with my Microsoft Account that also has admin permission in my Azure subscription.
The problem is that I can't see any web apps in the server explorer; I want to try remote debugging. I see a bunch of other Azure artifacts, but no web apps. Service bus and SQL databases lists content I expect. In screenshots I've seen on various MSDN posts, there should be a separate web apps node. I see an App Services node that doesn't list anything. All web apps are listed when I go to manage.windowsazure.com and portal.azure.com.
The App Service node has a context menu that allows me to create a new site. I did that and things got created correctly but nothing is displayed under the node.
This problem exists on both my home machine and work machine; both running a version of Windows 8.1. On my home machine I've re-installed the Azure tools without any effect.
I thought this too, for months. They renamed web sites to web apps, and are still seemingly renaming/moving things around. I just discovered my web site now live in Azure\App Service\<resource group> within Server Explorer. I can't see the individual slots, though I don't know or remember if that was possible previously...
I'm having a similar issue. Mine is a bit more complicated in that I have multiple subscriptions and the App Service node under Azure is only displaying the app service (web site) for my MSDN subscription but nothing from my corporate subscriptions. Yet all the other nodes like SQL Databases does show the complete list across all subscriptions.
Fixed! I updated the Azure tools to version 2.6 (I had 2.5). I then right-clicked on the Azure node and selected "Manage and Filter Azure Subscriptions". I made sure that all my subscriptions were selected and then clicked the tab "Regions" and made sure all the regions were also selected. I previously had filtered the regions to only North America as I have no intentions of creating a website in Asia...;)
After I saved the changes the Azure node refreshed and all the sites appeared as expected. I think the core issue was the filtering of the regions. Even though all my sites are located in Central-US and that check box was clicked, it wasn't until I removed all filtering for Regions that my sites finally appeared.
I was wondering how can I use Epicor 10 in Windows Azure.
I want to install the app server on Windows Azure, all the Epicor 10 components, when it's all done and ready, I would like to use normal PC's to conenct to the app server[Windows Azure], download Epicor Client and use it on the client PC's.
Is there any way to achieve this?
Thanks a lot for your time.
This seems like a reasonable setup to me. Epicor 10 hosted on an azure vm should work similarly to an install on a conventional server. Here is some microsoft documentation on creating azure vms: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/virtual-machines/
For a standard install, you should follow the microsoft tutorial as necessary along with the specifications set in the Epicor 10 hardware sizing guide (apply this to your vm creation) and Epicor 10 server implementation guide available on Epicweb.
You're probably aware of this if you're already in process for implementing E10 on Azure, but for preliminary concepts of Epicor on Windows Azure and explanation of Epicor working on azure, there's a presentation which is useful for slides 17-20ish and 37: https://epicweb.epicor.com/resources/MRCCustomers/Embracing%20the%20Cloud%20-%20Leveraging%20the%20Microsoft%20Azure%20Platform%20to%20Evolve%20your%20Business.pptx
You'll have to login to your epicweb account.
I'm an MSDN subscriber beginning a personal project that will involve WPF, Web Services, and SQL Server. I'm planning on using my MSDN benefits to host the Web Services on Azure and the database on SQL Azure.
I was going to run TFS on my own dev machine, but then heard about Microsoft's Team Foundation Service cloud offering. Also, it appears that I could run my own instance of TFS on Azure. At this point I'm thinking that Team Foundation Service is the best option because:
I'd prefer to have TFS in the cloud over my main dev machine so that I can access it anywhere and not have to worry about having to back it up.
I'd rather not have to worry about setting up and administrating TFS on Azure if I'm not getting anything extra out of it.
I'm not exactly sure if setting up and using TFS on Azure will be free (or continue to be free) with my MSDN Subscription.
Has anyone experienced any major drawbacks to using Team Foundation Service, like a major loss of flexibility or functionality?
I've been using TFS Services since it has been in preview for my personal work - and I haven't had any limitations in terms of source control/build services. The service is fairly comparable to the full TFS server; but doesn't include the more advanced features such as test automation.
The pricing page also states that service will continue to remain free for MSDN subscribers: https://tfs.visualstudio.com/en-us/pricing/information/
Before TFSPreview existed, I asked some people in the know at MS about running TFS in Azure and I was told that there are some non-trivial problems with running TFS on a virtual machine on Azure. I believe this is why MS are offering TFS as a service rather than as a template for a virtual machine. As such, if you want to use TFS and you want it to be in the cloud, I'd definitely use the TFS Preview.
I am looking at migrating a dotnetnuke website to Azure. I need both staging and production versions of the site to be running.
I have looked at using Azure Websites, but at the moment there is no support for SSL on custom domains so this can't be used for the production website. I have migrated the staging site to an Azure Website and now have numerous options for publishing updates (ftp, git, using web matrix).
Due to the constraints of Azure Websites, I used the DNN Accelerator to create a cloud service for the production environment. This set up will allow me to have control over IIS and therefore manage SSL certificates (I think).
The problem I have with this is there does not seem to be any publishing options. The only way I can publish is by connecting to the Azure instance via RDP and then copying the website files onto the files system.
Are there any other ways of publishing? I have looked at converting the website to a WAP, but I believe this has implications when it comes to updating to new DNN versions.
You should never publish your application through RDP since these changes are non-persistent (meaning what you published might disappear after a hardware failure / ...). Adding new instances would also mean that these instances don't have the files you published before.
I suggest you start by looking at the DotNetNuke Azure Accelerator first. If this doesn't fit your needs you might always try to build something yourself, but if you want to say with a regular website and not a web application I wouldn't count on Visual Studio support. In that case you might want to look at creating a package from the command line and using startup scripts to add your website in IIS.
Sounds like you need to use a Start-up task to install the files in the correct place for a Web Role (Cloud Service) Smarx has a nice overview here, MSDN has a wealth of info too http://blog.smarx.com/posts/introduction-to-windows-azure-startup-tasks
Another option is IAAS for Azure with a persisted VM, more work mind you, Cloud Service would be the most efficient and correct solution...