This Inside Azure Management E-Book is a Must Have for All Azure Cloud Administrators! It’s made by Great Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP’s)
who are working always with Microsoft Azure Cloud Services.You can download this Awesome Inside Azure Management E-Book here.
With 30+ Community talks, learning sessions, and skill-building activities exploring Minecraft, MakeCode, Visual Studio, AI, Azure, and more, there is something here for every student and every level of experience!
Azure Service Fabric is a distributed systems platform that makes it easy to package, deploy, and manage scalable and reliable microservices and containers.
When you want to great your own Azure Service Fabric Cluster for Production, you have to prepare your self and making a plan before you build.
When you have your Azure Service Fabric Standalone Cluster running, you want to deploy your microservices, apps or containers on it and test your solution. In the following steps I deploy with Visual Studio a Web App to Azure Service Fabric Cluster Standalone version 7.1.409
In the following steps we install Docker for Windows enterprise on a Windows Server 2019 which is running on a hypervisor platform in this case VMware to run a Linux container in the Datacenter.
When you are on a virtualization platform like Hyper-V or VMware and you have installed de Virtual machine with Microsoft Windows Server 2019 Standard edition, you must make the virtual processors ready for virtualization.
(Nested Virtualization) otherwise you can’t install Hyper-V on VMware.
This is the error you get.
Enable this feature for virtualization to the guest OS for VMware.
Now we have all the prerequisites installed on Microsoft Windows Server 2019, we can begin with Docker for Windows Enterprise via Powershell in Administrators modus :
Now we have Docker EE version 19.03.5 installed for Windows Server 2019.
It’s ready for Windows Containers.
But we want to run linux containers,
Now that we have Docker installed, we need to make some changes to the default configuration to enable support for Linux Containers. This involves setting an Environment variable and creating a docker daemon configuration file.
Microsoft Windows Admin Center for Hybrid IT Management
I really like to work with Microsoft Windows Admin Center for managing my Hybrid workloads Windows Servers in Azure Cloud Services but also our On-premises Servers on Hyper-V and VMware platform. Even our physical Windows Servers can be managed from Windows Admin Center.
You can extend on-premises deployments of Windows Server to the cloud by using Azure hybrid services. These cloud services provide an array of useful functions, including the following:
Protect virtual machines and use cloud-based backup and disaster recovery (HA/DR) with Azure Site Recovery.
Track what’s happening across your applications, network and infrastructure with the help of advanced analytics and machine learning in Azure Monitor.
Simplify network connectivity to Azure with Azure Network Adapter.
Keep virtual machines up to date with Azure Update Management.
Azure hybrid services work with Windows Servers in the following configurations:
Stand-alone physical servers and virtual machines (VMs)
I’m working with Windows Admin Center since day one, and you see the hybrid management tool evolving with great new features to make your life as an Administrator more easier. For example you get notifications when there are updates in extensions.
Notification details about update Extensions
When you click on the link “Go to Extensions” you will see the Extensions installed and the Updates which you can install from there.
Here you see an Azure Security Center Extension update.
There are not only Microsoft extensions, but also third party solution extensions and you could build your own extension for your solution. Here you find all the information about Windows Admin Center Extensions
Third Party Windows Admin Center Extensions
Installing a New extension is easy to do, the Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) was the last extension I installed in my Azure MVP Lab to work with. Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive, authenticated, browser-accessible shell for managing Azure resources. It provides the flexibility of choosing the shell experience that best suits the way you work, either Bash or PowerShell. Cloud Shell enables access to a browser-based command-line experience built with Azure management tasks in mind. So how does this look in Windows Admin Center?
Install the Azure Cloud Shell (Preview) Extension
You find the Installed Azure Cloud Shell in the pulldown menu of WAC
For Management of your Windows Servers you need some tools and consoles. Windows Admin Center is supporting you to get the Management consoles in one place to do your administration and updates.
The next tree Features are in Windows Admin Center to manage your Windows Server.
Powershell inside WAC of my Domain Controller
Windows PowerShell is a task-based command-line shell and scripting language designed especially for system administration. Built on the .NET Framework, Windows PowerShell helps IT professionals and power users control and automate the administration of the Windows operating system and applications that run on Windows.
Here you find more information about Windows Commands
Windows Update in Windows Admin Center.
Of course you need to update your Windows Servers, and what I like in WAC is that you get the information if an update needs a reboot before you click on Install Updates. This option is good for my Azure MVP Lab but when you need to update more then 100 Servers, you would do that centrally managed like with Update Management solution in Azure
Windows Remote Desktop in WAC
Remote Desktop is one of the Features of Windows Admin Center, to take over the desktop for installations of Applications for example.
Windows Admin Center got a lot more Features and Tools to Manage your Windows Servers in a Hybrid world.
Like these :
Storage
Security
System Insights
Scheduled Tasks
Installing Roles and Features of Windows Server
Registry
Processes running on your Windows Server
Managing and deploying Clusters
and much More………
You can install the following Resources to Manage with WAC
Windows Admin Center Overview
Conclusion:
Microsoft Windows Admin Center is the New Management tool for your Hybrid IT Management to Controle your Servers for your Business. It got all the Management consoles covered of Windows Servers to manage from one tool.
It’s easy to use and It keeps you Up-to-date of what is happening on your Windows Server but also what is New and updated. With Microsoft Windows Admin Center your are learning on the job and that’s what I Like 😉
Hope you will use Microsoft Windows Admin Center too for your Business, download it here for Free!
Whether you are new to distributed systems or have been deploying cloud-native systems for years, containers and Kubernetes can help you achieve new levels of velocity, agility, reliability, and efficiency. This book describes the Kubernetes cluster orchestrator and how its tools and APIs can be used to improve the development, delivery, and maintenance of distributed applications. Though no previous experience with Kubernetes is assumed, to make maximal use of the book you should be comfortable building and deploying server-based applications. Familiarity with concepts like load balancers and network storage will be useful, though not required. Likewise, experience with Linux, Linux containers, and Docker, though not essential, will help you make the most of this book.
When you install Azure Virtual Machines or Kubernetes Clusters in the Microsoft Cloud, It’s important to monitor your workload and keep your IT department in Control for the Business. Metric alerts in Azure Monitor work on top of multi-dimensional metrics. These metrics could be platform metrics, custom metrics, popular logs from Azure Monitor converted to metrics and Application Insights metrics.
IT Department of a company has most of the time different teams with each having it’s own responsibility of workloads in the Microsoft Cloud. For example, the Servicedesk is supporting the Business and they like to see if all the Services are up and running for the Business. The Infrastructure Team wants the same, but on deep level components of the Services like Memory, Network, Storage, CPU, Performance, Availability and more. The Technical Application Team is interested if the application is running and working with all the Interfaces, Databases, and/or Azure Pipelines.
Each Team can build there own Azure Dashboard(s) in the Microsoft Cloud.
Here I Have made an easy example of my Windows Server 2019 Virtual Machines and my Azure Kubernetes Cluster in One Microsoft Azure Dashboard :
You can Start from Azure Monitor Metrics
Or you can Start from the Virtual Machine Blade here.
When you have your Azure Monitor metrics ready with the right information then you can create it in your Azure Dashboard for your Team.
Select another Dashboard.
Create your Own Dashboard.
Now we have the first VM with CPU percentage in the Azure Dashboard.
Here I have added More Virtual Machines to the Same Metric Chart.
When you have Azure Kubernetes Cluster to monitor :
From here you can Add Container Insights information into your Azure Dashboard :
Adding Azure Monitor Container Insights of KubeCluster01
The Azure Monitor Container Insights logs for your Dashboard information, with Pin to Dashboard.
Azure Monitor for containers is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed to either Azure Container Instances or managed Kubernetes clusters hosted on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). Monitoring your containers is critical, especially when you’re running a production cluster, at scale, with multiple applications.
Azure Monitor for containers gives you performance visibility by collecting memory and processor metrics from controllers, nodes, and containers that are available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Container logs are also collected. After you enable monitoring from Kubernetes clusters, these metrics and logs are automatically collected for you through a containerized version of the Log Analytics agent for Linux and stored in your Log Analytics workspace.
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Discover and experience new ways to build, modernize, and migrate your applications. Get hands-on experiences with tools like Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) that can help you dynamically scale your application infrastructure.
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Get best practices on how to monitor your Kubernetes clusters from field experts in this episode of the Kubernetes Best Practices Series. In this intermediate level deep dive, you will learn about monitoring and logging in Kubernetes from Dennis Zielke, Technology Solutions Professional in the Global Black Belts Cloud Native Applications team at Microsoft.
Multi-cluster view from Azure Monitor
Azure Monitor provides a multi-cluster view showing the health status of all monitored AKS clusters deployed across resource groups in your subscriptions. It shows AKS clusters discovered that are not monitored by the solution. Immediately you can understand cluster health, and from here you can drill down to the node and controller performance page, or navigate to see performance charts for the cluster. For AKS clusters discovered and identified as unmonitored, you can enable monitoring for that cluster at any time.
Container Live Logs provides a real-time view into your Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) container logs (stdout/stderr) without having to run kubectl commands. When you select this option, new pane appears below the containers performance data table on the Containers view, and it shows live logging generated by the container engine to further assist in troubleshooting issues in real time.
Live logs supports three different methods to control access to the logs:
AKS without Kubernetes RBAC authorization enabled
AKS enabled with Kubernetes RBAC authorization
AKS enabled with Azure Active Directory (AD) SAML based single-sign on
You even can search in the Container Live Logs for Troubleshooting and history.
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 