Blog de Joe Freeman

This is the network setup for Azure Stack ASDK as of February 2020.  All of the Azure Stack VMs run on a single host using Storage Pool to host all the the VM disks. Note that the NAT gateway machine no longer exists. VMS Azure Stack ASDK installs these virtual machines. AzS-ACS01 AzS-ADFS01 AzS-CA01 AzS-DC01 AzS-ERCS01 AzS-Gwy01 AzS-NC01 AzS-SLB01 AzS-SQL01 AzS-SRNG01 AzS-WAS01 AzS-WASP01 AzS-Xrp01

Microsoft Azure Stack ASDK documentation  Prepare the host Set up the ASDK Installer GitHub Post Deploy steps   It is possible tovalidate via the priv endpoint prior to ASDK powershell installation. Register your ASDK with Azure ASDK Admin Basics (once installed) Process Overview The install starts on your Windows Server where you enable a direct bootable VHD The process then moves to running a bootable VHD running on the Windows Server.  The final step installs VM servers in Hyper-V inside the bootable VHD. Start and Stop You can reboot out of the VHD and back into your root system and back again without issues. The management VMs autostart and then deploy the rest of the components on Hyper-V restart. Video Walk-through Change Log 2020 02 09 Added post installation steps including Azure regsitration

Did you ever wake up, look at your development box and wonder "when did that happen"?  I've started using Docker for deployed services like databases, messages brokers etc.  At the same time, I've been trying to use Kali Linux for hackathons and general security work.   Windows gaming, my pathetic mobile efforts and windows docker development are done using Windows 10.  Windows must run under a Hypervisor or as a dual boot.  That is how you end up with three hypervisors, three operating systems and two docker environments on the same machine. The following diagram shows the underlying complexity of all this. Hypervisors in action HyperKit on OS/X:  Docker for Mac desktop runs docker containers inside a HyperKit virtual machine that leverages the Mac OS/X Hypervisor.framework.  Docker named drives live inside this virtual machine. VMWare Fusion on OS/X:  VMWare Fusion can host Windows and Linux virtual machines. Fusion suppor...

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...

This blog describes how to run the Microsoft TFS/ALM Hyper-V virtual machine in one of the VMWare hypervisors (Player/Workstation/Fusion). You can use the same concepts for any other virtual machine/appliance. The 2013 RTM  ALM image comes with a set of TFS and Visual studio labs .  The virtual machine and the labs  have a couple expectations: It comes as a a Hyper-V VHD running an evaluation copy of Windows Server 2012. The work items and other information are "point in time" information.  This means sprint, iteration or other information can only be used in the labs if the VMs time is set to a specific date(s).  The machine resets the time to the same specific date and time on every reboot. This lets you re-run the exercises.  Pay attention to the places the way the time is set if you wish to use this process for Virtual Machines anchored at dates and times other than the ones used for the TFS 2013 RTM ALM image used in this post. The labs work bes...

This is quick note on importing a Windows 8 or Server 2012 BootCamp partition that had Hyper-V hypervisor enabled. By default, you cannot have Hyper-V booted inside of Fusion because of hardware vitualization conflicts.  You know you have this problem if you see the following messages in the guest machine's window in VMWare Fusion. Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart.  We're just collecting some error info, and then you can restart. (100% complete) If you'd like to know more, you can search online later for this error:  SYSTEM_THREAD_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED (winhv.sys) Edit the Fusion VMX configuration file directly. You can fix this by editing the vmx file directly. Shutdown Fusion Find your Virtual Machine definition. Navigate to /users/<username>/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/VirtualMachines/Boot Camp . Right Click on the Boot Camp package and select Show Package Contents Edit the file that ends in .vmx  using TextEdit o...

Death Notice  Stackato was sold to HP and rebranded as Helion. The entire Helion product line was killed in 2016 Previous blog article A previous blog article described how to set up a developer micro PaaS using the Cloud Foundry based Stackato from ActiveState.  This article will describe some of the languages available in this environment. Application Languages Cloud Foundry and the Application Stackato clusters support the following languages "out of the box". You can use any of these languages in the Micro CloudFoundry instance we just configured Java, using the Tomcat server Node.js Perl PHP Python Ruby .Net languages are supported through either the Mono runtime or integrated .Net support provided by Iron Foundry. Active State has several  wiki/blog pages  on this. Other languages, including Clojure, can be added by importing  Heroku BuildPacks. Demo Apps Stackato demo programs http://community.activestate.com/stackato/...

Death Notice  Stackato was sold to HP and rebranded as Helion. The entire Helion product line was killed in 2016 Previous Blog Text Cloud Foundry  Open Source Platform as a Service (PaaS). It was initially driven by VMWare and later given to Pivotal when it was spun off from VMWare and EMC. The original version of Cloud Foundry was available as a hosted service and in a Micro  developer version that ran on a single VM that could be hosted on a developer workstation.  A community grew around this and there are now multiple versions of Cloud Foundry available. Cloud Foundry supports a Multi-tenant architecture where a cloud can support multiple organizations  each of which can have multiple spaces  to partition their work.  This architecture is available across all CF PaaS installations. Cloud Foundry updated to a new V2 architecture and implementation in June of 2013.  The CF "on a stick" micro version was abandon at that time. The Micro...

I have a lab environment of 5 machines, one AD/DNS/Manager and 4 Hyper-V virtual machines.    I want to be able to monitor the performance of the various hosts under different conditions to see where I've run out of resources. There are two major components to the monitoring.  The first is the performance counters  on each monitored machine. These act as the source of performance information. The second is a monitoring console. That console can either be one that displays all information or can be one that displays information only when performance numbers fall outside some criteria. Windows Server Manager Performance View The Windows Server Manager  displays performance information for out-of-bounds situations where the values coming off of a machine are outside of some specified range.  Server Manager monitors as many machines as you want from its' All Servers  page. Select the servers that you want to monitor in the Servers  pane of ...