Azure DevTest Labs is a service that helps developers and testers quickly create environments in Azure while minimizing waste and controlling cost. You can test the latest version of your application by quickly provisioning Windows and Linux environments using reusable templates and artifacts. Easily integrate your deployment pipeline with DevTest Labs to provision on-demand environments. Scale up your load testing by provisioning multiple test agents, and create pre-provisioned environments for training and demos.
From a developer’s desktop to a testing machine to a set of production machines, a Docker image can be created that will deploy identically across any environment in seconds. This story has created a massive and growing ecosystem of applications packaged in Docker containers, with DockerHub, the public containerized-application registry that Docker maintains, currently publishing more than 180,000 applications in the public community repository.
When you containerize an app, only the app and the components needed to run the app are combined into an “image”. Containers are then created from this image as you need them. You can also use an image as a baseline to create another image, making image creation even faster. Multiple containers can share the same image, which means containers start very quickly and use fewer resources. For example, you can use containers to spin up light-weight and portable app components – or ‘micro-services’ – for distributed apps and quickly scale each service separately.
Because the container has everything it needs to run your application, they are very portable and can run on any machine that is running Windows Server 2016. You can create and test containers locally, then deploy that same container image to your company’s private cloud, public cloud or service provider. The natural agility of Containers supports modern app development patterns in large scale, virtualized and cloud environments.
With containers, developers can build an app in any language. These apps are completely portable and can run anywhere – laptop, desktop, server, private cloud, public cloud or service provider – without any code changes.
Containers helps developers build and ship higher-quality applications, faster.
Docker runs processes in isolated containers. A container is a process which runs on a host. The host may be local or remote. When an operator executes docker run, the container process that runs is isolated in that it has its own file system, its own networking, and its own isolated process tree separate from the host.
Today Microsoft released Azure Stack Technical Preview 3 for customers to do Proof of Concept (POC) with Azure Cloud Platform Services in your own Datacenter.
Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) support provides identity options for scenarios where network connectivity is limited or intermittent.
You can use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets to provide managed scale out of workloads.
Use Azure D-Series VM sizes for increased performance and consistency.
Deploy and create templates with Temp Disks that are consistent with Azure.
Marketplace Syndication allows you to use content from the Azure Marketplace and make available in Azure Stack.
Infrastructure and operations
Isolated administrative and user portals and APIs provide enhanced security.
Use enhanced infrastructure management functionality, such as improved alerting.
Using the Windows Azure Pack connector, you can view and manage IaaS virtual machines that are hosted on a Cloud Platform System (CPS) stamp. For this preview release, you can try this only with a CPS environment and additional configuration is required.
More Technical documentation of Azure Stack TP3 and Deployment :
Service Map in #MSOMS automatically builds a common reference map of dependencies across your servers, processes, and third-party services. It discovers and maps all TCP dependencies, identifying surprise connections, remote third-party systems you depend on, and dependencies to traditional dark areas of your network such as Active Directory. Service Map discovers failed network connections that your managed systems are attempting to make, helping you identify potential server misconfiguration, service outages, and network issues.
Configuring Service Map solution in Operations Management Suite (OMS)
Service Map gets its data from the Microsoft Dependency Agent. The Dependency Agent is dependent on the OMS Agent for its connections to OMS. This means that a server must have the OMS Agent installed and configured first, and then the Dependency Agent can be installed. The following table describes the connected sources that are supported by the Service Map solution.
I like Microsoft OMS Service Map a lot because you can see the relations between Servers, Services, Applications in a Hybrid IT environment and
get proactive alerts to take action to keep your Hybrid Datacenters Healthy 🙂
Containers include the application and all of its dependencies –but share the kernel with other containers, running as isolated processes in user space on the host operating system. Docker containers are not tied to any specific infrastructure: they run on any computer, on any infrastructure, and in any cloud.
Microsoft Azure Storage Explorer is a standalone app from Microsoft that allows you to easily work with Azure Storage data on Windows, macOS and Linux.
New
You can now create, manage, and promote blob snapshots.
Storage Explorer will now automatically download the latest version when it is available.
You can now sign in to Azure China, Azure Germany, and Azure US Government accounts.
You can now change the zoom level. Use the options in the View menu to Zoom In, Zoom Out, and Reset Zoom.
Unicode characters are now supported in user metadata for blobs and files.
Accessibility improvements.
The next version’s release notes can be viewed from the update notification. You can also view the current release notes from the Help menu.
Fixes
Fixed: the version number is now correctly displayed in Control Panel on Windows
Fixed: search is no longer limited to 50,000 nodes
Fixed: upload to a file share spun forever if the destination directory did not already exist
Fixed: improved stability for long uploads and downloads
The Management Pack for Microsoft Azure enables you to monitor the availability and performance of Azure resources that are running on Microsoft Azure. The management pack runs on a specified server pool, and then uses Microsoft Azure REST APIs to remotely discover and collect performance information about the specified Microsoft Azure resources.
This management pack focuses on the collection of performance metrics made available by Azure Services that use Azure Resource Manager.
Azure Active Directory is used for authenticating Azure REST API calls.
This management pack queries Azure REST APIs to enumerate the resources running in an Azure subscription and the performance metrics available for each resource.
Virtual machines, web roles, and worker roles can store events and performance counters into Azure table storage by means of Azure diagnostics. If these resources are configured to use Azure diagnostics, this Management Pack can collect these events and performance counters.
Examples of services that can be discovered, and whether performance counters are available for collection, are presented in the table below.
Service
Discovered
Performance Counters
Notes
Application Insights
Yes
Yes
Automation
Yes
No
Backup
Yes
No
BizTalk
Yes
No
Cloud Service (web and worker roles)
Yes
Yes
Data Factory
Yes
Yes
DocumentDB
Yes
No
Metrics are not available in the Add Monitoring wizard
Logic App
Yes
No
Media Services
Yes
No
Uses Service Management APIs
Mobile Services
Yes
Yes
Uses Service Management APIs
Networks
Yes
No
Notification Hubs
Yes
No
Operational Insights
Yes
No
Redis Cache
Yes
Yes
Scheduler
Yes
No
Search
Yes
No
Service Bus
Yes
No
SQL Azure
Yes
Yes
Storage Accounts
Yes
No
Traffic Manager
Yes
No
Uses Service Management APIs
Virtual Machines
Yes
Yes
Virtual machines also appear as role instances for Cloud Services
The Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit (MAP) is an agentless, automated, multi-product planning and assessment tool for quicker and easier desktop, server and cloud migrations. MAP provides detailed readiness assessment reports and executive proposals with extensive hardware and software information, and actionable recommendations to help organizations accelerate their IT infrastructure planning process, and gather more detail on assets that reside within their current environment. MAP also provides server utilization data for Hyper-V server virtualization planning; identifying server placements, and performing virtualization candidate assessments. More information about MAP Toolkit can you find here
Software Requirements:
Operating system. Any of the following:
Windows 10 (Professional, Enterprise and Ultimate editions only)
Windows 8.1 (Professional and Enterprise editions only)
Windows 8 (Professional and Enterprise editions only)
Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 (Professional, Enterprise, and Ultimate editions only)
Installation of all updates for the operating system. Note: In some cases updates may not install automatically. To download updates for your computer manually, go to http://update.microsoft.com/.
By default, the MAP Toolkit will install SQL Server 2012 Express LocalDB during setup. You may also use an existing installation of SQL Server 2008, SQL Server 2008 R2, or SQL Server 2012 if you create an instance named “MAPS” before running the MAP Toolkit installer. The MAP Toolkit requires the collation order of the database engine to be set to “SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CI_AS”.
Notes:
Some of these prerequisites require restarting your computer. You may have to restart multiple times if all the prerequisites are not met prior to running Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit setup.
Scenario-dependent requirements:
For machines that will be used to run the Forefront Endpoint Protection Usage Tracking, Lync Usage Tracking, Exchange Server Usage Tracking, or Volume Licensing scenarios, please note: PowerShell 2.0 or higher must be installed.
For machines that will be used to collect Oracle schema information, please note: The 64 bit Oracle client must be installed on the MAP machine to collect the schema information. If the 64 bit client is not installed, MAP will only be able to collect instance information. MAP will not collect schema information if the 32 bit Oracle client is installed.
Export results in Excel for Windows Server 2016 Assessment Example
Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine Sizing Example in Excel
Cloud and Datacenter Management Blog 