Azure is live in SA

What can best be described as a momentous occasion for cloud services in South Africa Microsoft has announced that Azure is now available from datacentres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

At launch virtual machines from the A, B, D, E and F series machines will be available. Azure SQL database will be available as well as Azure Cosmos DB. At launch SQL Managed Instance will not be available. 

For those interested in backups, Azure Backup will be available in both regions while Azure Site Recovery will only be available from South Africa North. 

From a network perspective ExpressRoute and Virtual WAN will both be available locally

Archive storage, Disk storage and Storage Tiers will be available as will Managed Disks

The question many South Africa companies will ask is do I get into Azure but the question should probably be how can Azure help my business grow. The right partner can ensure that a cloud journey isn't costly and time consuming endeavor but a valuable path towards a better IT environment.

  

The mystics of Azure - Why the cloud isn't that different to on premise

For an IT pro today the (not so)new era of the cloud is not that different from the on premise world.

Cloud is built on the premise of not having to worry about the day to day underlying infrastructure. You don't have to worry about power, hardware etc. You do however need to worry about networking, security, performance just like an on premise environment.

As an IT pro today the skills that you have learnt previously will mainly still apply to the cloud world. Take networking for example. An Azure implementation still relies on basic networking concepts like sub nets etc to work so the IT pro still needs to understand these basic technologies. There is now just much more power in the networking stack. Things like micro segmentation build on what was available using VLAN's to configure and secure your cloud environment but the core concepts are the same.

Security is still just as important in the cloud as on premise but IT pro's can use the same skill sets used in the on premise world in the cloud. Most of the major firewall vendors provide virtual versions of their hardware devices so that the cloud environment becomes just another location that they manage.

IT pro's will still need to monitor the performance of the servers under their watch but they will increasingly need to monitor PaaS applications like Azure SQL Database or App Service. The good news is the tooling provided by default is streets ahead of what was available and improving all the time. The ability to use analytics to monitor log files and provide the right information without overloading the IT pro is a game changer that I wish we had when I got into IT.

To stay relevant the IT pro needs to complement their existing skills with cloud skills and they will be on a path to lifelong IT career.

Back to the Blog

So it's been 6 years since I last wrote, that must be some kind of record :-)

So here we are again, on the verge of Microsoft Azure's data centre's launching in South Africa. We have some very interesting developments happening in AI and machine learning. We have products like Teams getting better and better every day.

The purpose of this blog will be to put my thoughts to paper as the company I work for begins the journey to on board customers to Azure as well as my thoughts and tips on Office 365.

Hopefully you will find some benefit, if you do let me know with a comment.

Small Business Competency - The Good the bad and the ugly

So Microsoft has released the requirements for the new Small Business competency. The requirements are posted in Eric Ligman's blog here.

So far I am in two minds. Our business already has a silver competency so the $1850 fee is not a major concern but the requirement to has a staff member do the Office365 exam is crazy. Although Microsoft has "released" Office365 in South Africa but it is apparently hosted in Dublin. Which means international bandwidth, the bandwidth is improving all the time but unless they host it in South Africa we are not going to go near it.

Microsoft please listen to your partners... make the SBS 2011 exam a requirement and the Office 365 exam optional.

SBS on HyperV

I am currently setting up a Hyper V enviroment to run our internal SBS server plus one or two other servers and to provide a platform for our disaster recovery offering. Basically we offer a 25 seat DR Centre with PC's, Telephone, Internet Access etc. The idea is to virtualise the customers server to our Hyper V enviroment in the event of their building burning down or any such catastrophe. 

Now the challenge is to restore the SBS backup onto the Hyper V. Hyper V at the moment does not support pass through USB so just plugging the drive into the Hyper V will not work. 

So first I plugged the USB drive into the host machine. On the host machine Disk Management I put the drive offline. The drive is then availible as a drive in the settings of the VM. First off I set it as a SCSI drive but when I ran a restore it did not pick up the drive. Then I changed the drive setting so IDE. Booted off the SBS server, said repair my computer and it picked up the backup drive and the restore began. It took about 8 hours to restore 100Gb but that is probably down to the speed of the disk system in you test setup.

Remote shooting on a Canon SLR on 64 Bit Windows

This isn't about SBS but I am going to post it anyway. I dabble with a bit of photography on the side. I have a Canon 350D which isn't the fanciest camera but it works. Recently we rolled out iPhones to our company. A company called onOne software makes a pretty cool iPhone app to remote fire the camera. So I downloaded the remote app server and then discovered that Canon do not make a driver for any 64bit operating system. Most people just change the mode on the camera to Print/PTP to download their pics but it does not allow any remote shooting. This got me thinking.... Windows 7 has XP mode. So I downloaded XP mode for machine. Got it installed. Installed the Canon drivers for my camera in XP mode and attached the camera to the XP mode virtual machine. The virtual machine could see the camera so we were cooking with gas. I installed the remote app. I did have to install .Net 3.5 framework and then set the networking settings on the virtual machine to the wireless card on my notebook but I got the application to work... So anyone with Windows 7 64bit that needs to remote shoot with a Canon camera go with XP mode.

SBS 2011 is announced

So Microsoft has announced SBS 2011. Basically it comes in three versions.

Small  Business Server 2011 Essentials - 25 Users - No Exchange No Sharepoint but no CALS and the ability to backup your desktops to the server.

Small Business Server 2011 Standard -  75 Users - Windows 2008 R2 - Exchange 2010 SP1 - Sharepoint 2010. Normal CALs 

Small Business Server 2011 Premium -  As Above plus an Extra Windows 2008 R2 Standard license and SQL Server 2008 R2

Looks like the pricing will be similar to the current SBS 2008