It’s a year full of misery with the Covid-19 virus around the world. People who lose their loved one, It’s a very sad time for all of us! Microsoft technologies are still going on strong with new features in Azure Cloud Services but also supporting the people who are working in the healthcare, data analytics, Microsoft Teams for Collaboration and much more. But what I want to say to all HealthCare people over the world : THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR ALL THE WORK YOU DO 👍
I have deep respect for you all !
Community, Microsoft Product Teams, MVP Lead, WIndows Insiders, I wish you and your family happy holidays and a Healthy 2021 with lot of Success! 🎄😍
The world of data is moving and changing a lot with new IT technologies coming up like leaves on a tree.
Data is everywhere, on Servers, workstations, BYOD Devices in the Cloud but how do you keep your data save and protected for your business today and in the future? There are a lot of reasons why you should Backup your data :
One of your employees accidentally deleted important files for example.
Your data got compromised by a virus.
Your Server crashed
You have to save your data for a period of time by Law
And there will be more reasons why you should do backup…………….
A lot of Enterprise organizations are moving to the Cloud with workloads for the Business, but how is your Backup and Disaster Recovery managed today? A lot of data transitions are made but what if your Backup and Disaster Recovery solution is out dated or reaching end of Life? You can have a lot of Questions like :
What data should I backup?
Should I just upgrade the Backup Solution?
How can I make my Data Management Backup -DR Solution Cheaper and ready for the future?
How can I make my new Backup-DR Solution independent? ( Vendor Lockin)
And there will be more questions when you are in this scenario where you have to renew your Backup – DR Solution.
Here we have the following Great Backup Solution from 2014 :
Offsite Microsoft DPM Backup Solution since 2014
Here we have 3 System Center Data Protection Manager Backup Pods with a Tape library and One DPM pod connected with a Microsoft Azure Backup Vault in the Cloud. You do the Security updates and the Rollups for Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center Data Protection Manager 2012 to keep the Solution save and running.
Long Time Protection to Tape
DPM 2012 Server with direct attached Storage for Short time protection
The four DPM Backup Pods have the same Storage configuration for short time protection with a retention time of 15 days. After that Longtime protection is needed with Backup to tape and Backup to Microsoft Azure Backup Vault.
Since 2014 the Backup data is depending on these solution configurations.
Tape Management cost a lot of time and money
The fourth DPM Backup pod got a Azure Backup Vault in the Cloud to save Tape Management time.
DPM Backup to Microsoft Azure Cloud Backup Vault.
So this is the Start of the Journey to a New Data Management Backup – DR Solution transformation. The next Couple of weeks I will search for the different scenarios and solutions on the Internet and talk with the Community looking for Best Practices. I will do Polls on Social Media and a Serie of blogposts for the Data Management Backup – DR Solution to keep the business continuity.
Will it be a Cloud Backup – DR Solution?
Will it be a Hybrid Cloud Backup – DR Solution?
Everything in One Management Console?
Or More then One Backup -DR Solution for the right Job?
We will see what the journey will bring us based on Best Practices 😉
This Enterprise reference architecture shows how to implement a hub-spoke topology in Azure. The hub is a virtual network (VNet) in Azure that acts as a central point of connectivity to your on-premises network. The spokes are VNets that peer with the hub, and can be used to isolate workloads. Traffic flows between the on-premises datacenter and the hub through an ExpressRoute or VPN gateway connection.
We only use the Azure Private peering
For this Hybrid Cloud Strategy we made four Microsoft Azure Subscriptions via the EA Portal :
Azure HUB Subscription for the connectivity via Azure ExpressRoute to On-premises Datacenter.
Azure Spoke 1 for Production workload and Cloud Services
Azure Spoke 2 for Test and Acceptance Cloud Services
Azure Spoke 3 for Future plans
The naming convention rules and restrictions for Azure resources and a baseline set of recommendations for naming conventions. You can use these recommendations as a starting point for your own conventions specific to your needs.
The choice of a name for any resource in Microsoft Azure is important because:
It is difficult to change a name later.
Names must meet the requirements of their specific resource type.
Consistent naming conventions make resources easier to locate. They can also indicate the role of a resource in a solution.The key to success with naming conventions is establishing and following them across your applications and organizations.
Azure connectivity and RBAC Identity
This tenant is federated with via ADFS and Azure Connect to Office 365. Identity management is provisioned
via Microsoft Identity Manager 2016 (MIM2016). With this already in place, we can Configure Microsoft Azure RBAC in the subscriptions.
Access management for cloud resources is a critical function for any organization that is using the cloud. Role-based access control (RBAC) helps you manage who has access to Azure resources, what they can do with those resources, and what areas they have access to.
RBAC is an authorization system built on Azure Resource Manager that provides fine-grained access management of resources in Azure.
Business Development
For Business Development we have a separated Active Directory in one forest and also federated via ADFS to Microsoft Office 365. For this environment we build one Azure subscription with a temporary Site-to-Site VPN connection to On-premises datacenter for the “Lift and Shift” migration via Azure-Site-Recovery (ASR)
S2S VPN IKE v2 tunnel with Cisco and Azure.
Azure Virtual Networks
Next step is to build the connections between the Azure HUB Subscription and the Azure Spoke subscription(s) when every Microsoft Azure subscription has It’s own Virtual Network (VNET). This is called VNET peering.
Virtual network peering enables you to seamlessly connect two Azure virtual networks. Once peered, the virtual networks appear as one, for connectivity purposes. The traffic between virtual machines in the peered virtual networks is routed through the Microsoft backbone infrastructure, much like traffic is routed between virtual machines in the same virtual network, through private IP addresses only. Azure supports:
VNet peering – connecting VNets within the same Azure region
Global VNet peering – connecting VNets across Azure regions
Here you see my step-by-step VNET peering creation from HUB to Spoke 1 :
Go to the VNET of the Azure HUB Subscription. and then to Peerings => Add.
Here you make the connection with Spoke 1 Azure subscription.
For Azure HUB is Peering to Spoke 1 Done.
Now we go to the VNET of Azure Subscription Spoke 1 to make the connection.
Go to VNET => Peerings => Click on Add in the Azure Spoke 1 Subscription
Connect here to the Azure HUB
The VNET Peering between Azure HUB subscription and Spoke 1 is Connected.
In this order you have to make the other VNET Peerings from the Azure HUB subscription to the other Spoke Subscriptions so that the network connectivity between VNETs is working. Because we have the Azure Internet Edge in the HUB for the other subscriptions.
In the Azure Reference Architecture we also do Security by Design in the Cloud with Firewall and Azure Network Security Groups (NSG) and every Azure component get it’s own Tag for Security Groups and Billing – Usage.
Azure Storage
In every Microsoft Azure Subscription (HUB and Spoke ) we created a Storage Account. You can choose for different kind of storage in Microsoft Azure.
Durable and highly available. Redundancy ensures that your data is safe in the event of transient hardware failures. You can also opt to replicate data across datacenters or geographical regions for additional protection from local catastrophe or natural disaster. Data replicated in this way remains highly available in the event of an unexpected outage. Secure. All data written to Azure Storage is encrypted by the service. Azure Storage provides you with fine-grained control over who has access to your data. Scalable. Azure Storage is designed to be massively scalable to meet the data storage and performance needs of today’s applications. Managed. Microsoft Azure handles maintenance and any critical problems for you. Accessible. Data in Azure Storage is accessible from anywhere in the world over HTTP or HTTPS. Microsoft provides SDKs for Azure Storage in a variety of languages — .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, PHP, Ruby, Go, and others — as well as a mature REST API. Azure Storage supports scripting in Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI. And the Azure portal and Azure Storage Explorer offer easy visual solutions for working with your data.
Azure Storage includes these data services: Azure Blobs: A massively scalable object store for text and binary data. Azure Files: Managed file shares for cloud or on-premises deployments. Azure Queues: A messaging store for reliable messaging between application components. Azure Tables: A NoSQL store for schemaless storage of structured data.
Creating your Azure Storage accounts by Design.
One of our Architecture Security by Design policy, is to Encrypt all the storage in Azure via Microsoft Azure Key vault.
Deploying Azure IaaS Virtual Machine with ARM Templates
Enterprise organizations with more then ten employees managing IT datacenters are working by process and order to do the job for the business. When they are all using the Azure Portal and deploy Virtual Machines manually you will get a mess and things can go wrong. In Microsoft Azure you have the Azure Resource Manager for deploying JSON ARM Templates. With these Azure Resource Manager Templates you can automate your workload deployments in Microsoft Azure. For example : We build a JSON template to deploy a Windows Server in the right Azure Subscription in the right Azure Resource Group and with the following extensions to it :
Antimalware agent installed
Domain joined in the right OU (Active Directory)
Azure Log analytics agent installed ( Connected to Azure Monitor and SCOM )
Encryption by default.
Using with our Azure naming conventions and Azure policy we always deploy consistent without making mistakes or by wrong typing in the Azure portal. When you write and make your ARM templates for different workloads, you can store them in Azure DevOps Repo ( Repository) and you can connect your private repo to GitHub.
Making ARM templates works really Awesome with Microsoft Visual Studio Code which is opensource and free of charge. You can add your favorite VSC extensions to work with like Azure Resource Manager.
Our Azure ARM Template to deploy Virtual Machines into Azure HUB-Spoke model with VSC
Azure monitoring and Recovery Service Vault
To manage your Azure Hybrid Cloud environment you have to monitor everything to keep in control of your Virtual Datacenter. And of course you have to plan your business continuity with Azure Recovery Services (Backup) by Design. We made in every Azure Subscription an Azure Recovery Services Vault for making Backups. This is because you don’t want backup traffic over your VNET peering’s. In the Azure HUB subscription we made a second Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Vault for the “Lift & Shift” migration of On-premises Virtual Machines to the landing zone in Azure HUB.
With Microsoft Azure Monitor we use Log Analytics and Service maps and with the same OMS agent on the Virtual Machine, we still can use Microsoft System Center Operation Manager (SCOM) connected to the same agent 🙂
When you have 45 locations, 45.000 students with BYOD and 10.000 Managed workstations, you will monitor 24 x 7 to keep everything running for your Business. Monitoring Express Route with a Backup connection is a must for your Hybrid Virtual Datacenter. Here you have more information about monitoring Express Route Circuit
Monitoring our Express Route
With this all installed in Microsoft Azure by Design, we have the policy Security First !
Microsoft Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection across hybrid cloud workloads. With Security Center, you can apply security policies across your workloads, limit your exposure to threats, and detect and respond to attacks.
We still have a lot to configure in Microsoft Azure to get the Basic Architecture Design in place. When that is done, I will make three more blogposts about this datacenter transformation :
“Lift and Shift” migration with ASR for Virtual Machines on Hyper-V and VMware.
SQL assessment and Data Migration to Azure
Optimize of all Workloads in Microsoft Azure.
Hope this blogpost will help you too with your Datacenter transition to Microsoft Azure Cloud.
Don’t miss the Live Stream of Microsoft Ignite 2018
Get the latest insights and skills from technology leaders and practitioners shaping the future of cloud, data, business intelligence, teamwork, and productivity. Immerse yourself with the latest tools, tech, and experiences that matter, and hear the latest updates and ideas directly from the experts.
Watch live https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/ignite as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella lays out his vision for the future of tech, then watch other Microsoft leaders explore the most important tools and technologies coming in the next year. After the keynotes, select Microsoft Ignite sessions will stream live—take a deep dive into the future of your profession.
System Center Configuration Manager Current Branch provides a total systems management solution for a people-centric world. It can deploy applications to individuals using virtually any device or platform, centralizing and automating management across on-premise, service provider, and Microsoft Azure environments. In System Center Configuration Manager Current Branch Unleashed, a team of world-renowned System Center experts shows you how to make the most of this powerful toolset.
A Great Book and a Must have for every System Center Administrator, the book has more then 1100 pages with the following Chapters :
Configuration management basics
Configuration manager overview
Looking inside configuration manager
Architecture design planning
Network design
Installing and updating system center configuration manager
Upgrading and migrating to configmgr current branch
Using the configuration manager console
Client management
Managing compliance
Creating and managing applications
Creating and using deployment types
Creating and managing applications and packages
Distributing and deploying applications and packages
Managing software updates
Integrating intune hybrid into your configuration manager environment
Managing mobile devices
Conditional access in configuration manager
Endpoint protection
Configuration manager queries
Configuration manager reporting
Operating system deployment
Security and delegation in configuration manager
Backup, recovery, and maintenance
Configuration manager log files
Extending hardware inventory
Co-managing windows intune and configmgr
Reference urls
The System Center Configuration Manager Current Branch Unleashed is written by the following world wide Experts :
Kenneth van Surksum
Kerrie Meyler
Gerry Hampson
Saud Al-Mishari
Greg Ramsey
Michael Wiles
Byron Holt
Garth Jones
SCVMM 1801 supports management of ARM-based VMs, Azure Active Directory (AD) based authentication that is created by using the new Azure portal and region-specific Azure subscriptions (namely, Germany, China, US Government Azure regions).
What is New in System Center Data Protection Manager version 1801 ?
The following features are either new to DPM, or are improved for DPM 2016.
Modern Backup Storage – Using Resilient File System (ReFS) block-cloning technology to store incremental backups, DPM 2016 dramatically improves storage utilization and performance. The storage consumed by backups grows and shrinks with the production data source, and there is no over-allocation of storage. Resilient change tracking (RCT) – DPM uses RCT (the native change tracking in Hyper-V), which removes the need for time-consuming consistency checks. RCT provides better resiliency than the change tracking provided by VSS snapshot-based backups. DPM also uses RCT for incremental backup. It identifies VHD changes for virtual machines, and transfers only those blocks that are indicated by the change tracker.
Continued protection during cluster aware updates – Windows Server 2016 comes with the cluster OS rolling update, where a cluster can be upgraded to Windows Server 2016 without bringing it down. DPM 2016 continues to protect VMs during the upgrade, maintaining the backup service level agreement (SLA). Shielded VM Backups – Shielded VMs in Windows Server 2016 help protect sensitive VMs from inspection, tampering, and data theft by malware and malicious administrators. DPM 2016 backups retain the protections provided by shielded VMs to ensure they can be recovered seamlessly and securely. Hyper-V with Storage Spaces Direct – DPM recognizes and protects Hyper-V VMs deployed on Storage Spaces Direct, delivering seamless backup and recovery of VMs in disaggregated and hyper-converged scenarios.
Hyper-V with ReFS SOFS Cluster – DPM 2016 can back up Hyper-V VMs deployed on ReFS-based SOFS clusters. Backup and recovery of RCT-based VMs and non-RCT VMs is supported. Upgrading a DPM production server to 2016 doesn’t require a reboot – When you upgrade to DPM 2016, you are not required to reboot the production server. To avoid rebooting the production server, upgrade to DPM 2016 and upgrade the DPM agent on the production servers. Backups continue and you reboot the production server when you want.
What is New in System Center Operations Manager version 1801 ?
Enter product key from the Operation Console
Linux monitoring
Improved HTML5 dashboarding experience
System Center Visual Studio Authoring Extension (VSAE) support for Visual Studio 2017
Enhanced SDK Client performance
Updates and recommendations for third-party Management Packs
Linux Kerberos support
Service Map integration
Microsoft Service Map automatically discovers application components on Windows and Linux systems and maps the communication between services. It automatically builds a common reference map of dependencies across your servers, processes, and third-party services. Integration between Service Map and System Center Operations Manager allows you to automatically create distributed application diagrams in Operations Manager that are based on the dynamic dependency maps in Service Map.
Microsoft Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection across hybrid cloud workloads. With Security Center, you can apply security policies across your workloads, limit your exposure to threats, and detect and respond to attacks.
You can select an existing Log Analytics workspace to store datacollected by Security Center. To use your existing Log Analytics workspace:
• The workspace must be associated with your selected Azure subscription.
• At a minimum, you must have read permissions to access the workspace.
You can edit the default security policy for each of your Azure subscriptions in Security Center. To modify a security policy, you must be an owner, contributor, or security administrator of the subscription. To configure security policies in Security Center, do the following:
1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
2. On the Security Center dashboard, under General, select Security policy.
3. Select the subscription that you want to enable a security policy for.
4. In the Policy Components section, select Security policy.
This is the default policy that’s assigned by Security Center. You can turn on or off the available security recommendations.
5. When you finish editing, select Save.
Azure Security Center provides unified security management and advanced threat protection for workloads running in Azure, on-premises, and in other clouds. It delivers visibility and control over hybrid cloud workloads, active defenses that reduce your exposure to threats, and intelligent detection to help you keep pace with rapidly evolving cyber attacks.
Pricing tiers Security Center is offered in two tiers:
• The Free tier is automatically enabled on all Azure subscriptions, and provides security policy, continuous security assessment, and actionable security recommendations to help you protect your Azure resources.
• The Standard tier extends the capabilities of the Free tier to workloads running in private and other public clouds, providing unified security management and threat protection across your hybrid cloud workloads. The Standard tier also adds advanced threat detection capabilities, which uses built-in behavioral analytics and machine learning to identify attacks and zero-day exploits, access and application controls to reduce exposure to network attacks and malware, and more. The Standard tier is free for the first 60 days. Read here more…….
What are OS Security Configurations?
Azure Security Center monitors security configurations using a set of over 150 recommended rules for hardening the OS, including rules related to firewalls, auditing, password policies, and more. If a machine is found to have a vulnerable configuration, a security recommendation is generated.
Customization of the rules can help organizations to control which configuration options are more appropriate for their environment. This feature enables users to set a customized assessment policy and apply it on all applicable machines in the subscription.
Note • Currently OS Security Configuration customization is available for Windows Server 2008, 2008R2, 2012, 2012R2 operating systems only. • The configuration applies to all VMs and computers connected to all workspaces under the selected subscription. • OS Security Configuration customization is available only on Security Center’s Standard tier.
Download the Baseline configuration JSON file
You can make a Custom Baseline with Visual Studio Code and Upload to Azure
Planning guide
This guide covers a set of steps and tasks that you can follow to optimize your use of Security Center based on your organization’s security requirements and cloud management model. To take full advantage of Security Center, it is important to understand how different individuals or teams in your organization use the service to meet secure development and operations, monitoring, governance, and incident response needs. The key areas to consider when planning to use Security Center are:
Security Roles and Access Controls
Security Policies and Recommendations
Data Collection and Storage
Ongoing non-Azure resources
Ongoing Security Monitoring
Incident Response
Integrated Azure security solutions
Security Center makes it easy to enable integrated security solutions in Azure. Benefits include:
Simplified deployment: Security Center offers streamlined provisioning of integrated partner solutions. For solutions like antimalware and vulnerability assessment, Security Center can provision the needed agent on your virtual machines, and for firewall appliances, Security Center can take care of much of the network configuration required.
Integrated detections: Security events from partner solutions are automatically collected, aggregated, and displayed as part of Security Center alerts and incidents. These events also are fused with detections from other sources to provide advanced threat-detection capabilities.
Unified health monitoring and management: Customers can use integrated health events to monitor all partner solutions at a glance. Basic management is available, with easy access to advanced setup by using the partner solution.
Identity and Access Overview in Azure Security Center
Application Whitelisting
Just in time virtual machine (VM) access can be used to lock down inbound traffic to your Azure VMs, reducing exposure to attacks while providing easy access to connect to VMs when needed.
Attack scenario
Brute force attacks commonly target management ports as a means to gain access to a VM. If successful, an attacker can take control over the VM and establish a foothold into your environment.
One way to reduce exposure to a brute force attack is to limit the amount of time that a port is open. Management ports do not need to be open at all times. They only need to be open while you are connected to the VM, for example to perform management or maintenance tasks. When just in time is enabled, Security Center uses Network Security Group (NSG) rules, which restrict access to management ports so they cannot be targeted by attackers.
Azure Security Center’s advanced detection capabilities, helps you identify active threats targeting your Microsoft Azure resources and provides you with the insights needed to respond quickly
Security Center has a set of predefined security alerts, which are triggered when a threat, or suspicious activity takes place. In some scenarios, you may want to create a custom alert to address specific needs of your environment.
Custom alert rules in Security Center allow you to define new security alerts based on data that is already collected from your environment. You can create queries, and the result of these queries can be used as criteria for the custom rule, and once this criteria is matched, the rule is executed. You can use computers security events, partner’s security solution logs or data ingested using APIs to create your custom queries.
What is security playbook in Security Center?
Security playbook is a collection of procedures that can be executed from Security Center once a certain playbook is triggered from selected alert. Security playbook can help to automate and orchestrate your response to a specific security alert detected by Security Center. Security Playbooks in Security Center are based on Azure Logic Apps, which means you can use the templates that are provided under the security category in Logic Apps templates, you can modify them based on your needs, or you can create new playbooks using Azure Logic Apps workflow, and using Security Center as your trigger.
Description: This is the updated release (v2.0) of “Inside the Microsoft Operations Management Suite”, an end-to-end deep dive into the full range of Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS) features and functionality, complete with downloadable sample scripts.
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 