Blog de Joe Freeman

The Microsoft Accounts mess can make it hard to use your Azure credits that come bundled with MSDN/VSOL. You  can end up with two accounts with the same name, one work/school in your corporate domain and one personal  Microsoft ID outside the corporate domain.  Enterprise users run into this when they want to learn in Azure using their Corporate MSDN Azure credits. Both accounts have the same email domain which means they both have corporate accessibility zone restrictions even though the two accounts are not connected in any way and have no way of seeing each other's resources. We can share this subscription with your personal, non-corp domain, account or create an ID that only exists in the ID that is tied to the subscription.  This lets you learn Azure  while sitting at home or the coffee shop.  This blog assumes you are allowed to use your Azure credits for your education from personal gear.  If not, then stop here. Video Discussion Initia...

Azure Active Directory has always been sort of  just there .  I've never paid any attention to the concept of Azure Active Directory tenants until last week. Azure AD was just an idea when we first started our Azure work 8 years ago. There were all kinds of "you can't do that in Azure AD" wrappers around it back then. Azure AD has grown in flexibility. Now it is time to look at the multi-tenancy aspects of Azure AD. You can spend years in Azure without running across the tenancy.   Got a personal Azure account?  One tenant is plenty.   Got an MSDN Azure subscription tied to your account? One tenant is plenty.   Working in a corporate environment where some other group manages AD and provides your subscriptions?  One tenant might be all you ever use. We can walk through an example account to get a better understanding of Azure AD tenants why we might use them. Video Azure AD Ten...

This article is not for you if you are happy developing/testing with at most two machines, your developer machine and a machine under test.  It is not for you if you do all your product evaluation, training and test can only be done in Azure or some other cloud environment that doesn't support nested virtualizaiton. This is really about building your own virtual labs or data centers to simulate larger installations or to use as training environments.  Microsoft applications or machine clusters often include Active Directory, a database and some application servers. You can some times install all this on single machines.  Multiple machines make sense if you are working on clustering or wish to leverage portions of your setup for future projects. Microsoft often provides VHDs for some of their more complicated products that save you configuration time. These machines are often more interesting when integrated into to some type of application including AD databases or...

Modified 2013/02/09 to add remote management enablement We're going create a Hyper-V Microsoft virtual lab environment on a Mac with the following configuration as discussed in this previous blog article  http://joe.blog.freemansoft.com/2013/01/run-microsoft-virtual-lab-on-mac-with.html .  We can use the same approach on Linux machine using VMWare workstation / player. Our mini-data center consists of 5 machines. A Windows 2012 Server hosting Active Directory and DNS.  The machine also holds/manages the hyper-v environment used to run the rest of the machines Two Windows 2012 servers to be used as application machines One Windows 2012 server used to run SQLServer 2012 One Windows 2012 server used to run the on-prem version of windows service bus We're not actually going to install any application software in this article.. The basic steps are Install Windows Server 2012 that will be our AD/DNS/Hyper-V host Hack the VMWare/Fusion/Workstation dhcp....