SCOM - New Community Windows Azure Pack MP

Another super community contribution - this time from my buddy Oskar Landman - here's a picture of me towering over him at the MVP Summit a few years back...

Noticing that the existing Windows Azure Pack MP was seriously lacking functionality, Oskar took it on himself to rewrite it completely and then release a new version to the community for free!

He's added diagram views, performance views and enough state views to keep everyone happy..

If you or your customers have deployed Windows Azure Pack and are using SCOM, then this MP is an absolute no-brainer to import.

Check out Oskar's full post on SystemCenterCentral.com from the link below:

http://www.systemcentercentral.com/windows-azure-pack-scom-management-pack/

You can download the MP directly from the TechNet Gallery here.

New Windows Azure Pack (WAP) & Azure Visio Stencils Available for Download

Well, it's been a few months since I last had a chance to work on some new Visio stencils and finally, I've managed to put one together for the relatively new Windows Azure Pack (aka WAP) and have bundled into the same stencil, some graphics for Windows Azure too.

If you're looking for some other Visio stencils related to System Center 2012 R2,  then you can find them here:

SCVMM 2012 R2 Visio Stencils

DPM 2012 R2 Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 Infrastructure Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 Application Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 Networking Visio Stencils

SCOM 2012 R2 APM Visio Stencils

This stencil contains images that cover things like the WAP Admin & Tenant portals, SPF Web Server, SMA, Service Bus and Workflow Manager.

I've also thrown in things like Visual Studio Online with its Global Service Monitor and APM capabilities, Orchestrator, VMM, AppController and standard Windows Azure roles and functions.

You can download the stencil from the TechNet Gallery at the following link:

http://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/Windows-Azure-Pack-Windows-813d13a8


If you find this stencil useful, please take the time to give it a Star rating on the TechNet Gallery :)

Let me know if you have any suggestions or problems with the stencil by posting in the comments section below.

Windows Azure Pack Troubleshooting on TechNet

Microsoft has just added nearly 50 new troubleshooting topics for Windows Azure Pack (WAP) and Service Provider Foundation (SPF) onto the TechNet library.

If you're new to Windows Azure Pack or SPF (as most people are!), and run into problems when deploying either of them, then this is as good a place as any to get started with your troubleshooting.

There's a multitude of categories to work from and some of the main ones are listed below:

• Accounts, Subscriptions, and Plans Troubleshooting
  
  Investigates issues that are related to onboarding tenants, establishing accounts, subscriptions to plans. Also includes issues regarding plan quota levels.
  
• Automation and Tools Troubleshooting
  
  Investigates issues that pertain to Service Management Automation and issues that are related to using runbooks, tools, and developer kits for use with Windows Azure Pack.
  
• Installation and Networking Troubleshooting
  
  Investigates Contains issues that are related to installation and post installation tasks and networking tasks.
  
• Security Troubleshooting
  
  Provides an overview for how to use credentials, and investigates issues that are related to authentication, claims-based authentication, tokens, certificates, and Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS).
  
• Service Provider Foundation Troubleshooting
  
  Investigates issues that are related to Service Provider Foundation and its usage with Windows Azure Pack.
  
• Virtual Machine Clouds Troubleshooting
  
  Investigates issues that pertain to provisioning virtual machine clouds, creating virtual machine roles, importing gallery items, and using Remote Console.
  
• Web Site Clouds and other Providers Troubleshooting
  
  Investigates issues that are related to deploying Web Sites, SQL Server, MySQL database, and providers for and features in Windows Azure Pack.

Check out the full new library content here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn554311.aspx

When you've managed to read through all this information, then why not take a look at the excellent Windows Azure Pack wiki for everything WAP related here.

 

Free Training on Azure and the Windows Azure Pack (WAP)

Yesterday I managed to get some time to participate in a very useful (and free) online webinar that was organised by my buddies over in the UK - Steve Beaumont and Simon Skinner - who run the excellent Cloud OS Community website and user group.

 

The guys managed to get my Irish MVP colleague Damian Flynn to put together a presentation on Microsoft's relatively new Windows Azure Pack (which is designed for on premise private cloud/ IT infrastructure management) and how it compares to the public cloud Windows Azure model. Although I've a pretty good understanding of the Windows Azure Pack, this session has come at a good time for me because I'm currently in the process of working through our own (Ergo's) deployments of it for our datacentre and customer offerings.

The session was just over an hour long with some very useful Q & A's throughout and not even a day after the event, the guys have uploaded the video along with all of the links that were mentioned during the session.

If you have some time and are interested in learning about this cool new technology, then I'd highly recommend checking out the content here:

http://www.cloudoscommunity.com/blogs/cid/3951/Windows-Azure-Pack-Webinar

Enjoy!

Download the VM Role Authoring Tool for Windows Azure Pack

A few days ago, the new VM Role Authoring Tool for Windows Azure Pack (WAP) and System Center 2012 R2 has been released on Codeplex. This tool is used to author the VM Role 'Resource Definition' and 'Resource Extension' artifacts.

Here's a description of the tool taken from Codeplex:

The release of the Virtual Machine Role in Windows Azure Pack and System Center 2012 R2 introduces a cloud service application deployment model to deploy virtual machine workloads that will be deployable on premise and in Windows Azure in the coming year.

 

Hand-crafting these packages against the published schemas of the model is a slow and tedious task.

 

You can download it from here: https://vmroleauthor.codeplex.com/

If you want to see this tool in action, then I highly recommend you check out this series of tutorials from Microsoft's Charles Joy here:

Creating a Linux VM Role Resource Definition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrGjA1mYN4M

Creating a Linux VM Role Resource Extension
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdVsmF4GeYE

Creating a Windows Server VM Role Resource Definition
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66zznivfh_s

Creating a Windows Server VM Role Resource Extension  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCilD2P8vhE

Updating a Virtual Machine Role Gallery Item
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAm38TMz8RU

When you've watched the video's, I'd recommend that if you're interested in WAP and System Center 2012 R2, then you subscribe to Charles' YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/user/charlesjoyMS) to keep up to date with anything new he releases.