How to upload an image VHD to Windows Azure using CSUpload

Introduction One of the exciting new possibilites in Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the ability to create Virtual Machine images (VHD files) locally and upload them to your own image store in Windows Azure, and use them as the basis for new VMs. In this article I will demonstrate the process of …

More free stuff in Windows Azure Active Directory

Microsoft announced today that they will offer two features in Windows Azure Active Directory free of charge; Access Control and Core Directory and Authentication. Access Control provides centralized authentication and authorization by integrating with consumer identity providers such as Facebook or by using an on-premises deployment of the Windows Server Active Directory service. With Access …

Which accounts can I assign as Windows Azure co-administrators?

Recently the ability to add co-administrators to you Windows Azure portal was migrated from the old Silverlight portal to the new HTML 5 portal. Happy times! You can only add valid Microsoft Accounts or accounts from Windows Azure Active Directory as co-administrators. Office 365 uses Windows Azure Active Directory to if you have an account …

Decoding some certificate enrollment client events

The Events Windows clients can request certificates on their own (autoenrollment) or with the help of a user. When enrolling for a certificate you may find this pair of events in your Application log: Source: Microsoft-Windows-CertificateServicesClient-CertEnroll Event ID: 64 Level: Information User: S-1-5-18 User Name: NT AUTHORITYSYSTEM Computer: <servername> Description: Certificate enrollment for Local system …

Enabling notify-driven replication across Active Directory sites

Introduction Active Directory sites, site links and site link bridges exist to be able to tell the directory service about the network’s physical topology. Specifically to identiy which parts of it are well connected and where there are slow WAN links. The rule of thumb here is that all systems that are connected with at …

How to connect your on-premise network to Windows Azure using Windows Server as a VPN gateway

Introduction Together with the launch of Windows Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) this summer, Microsoft also introduced a way for customers to connect their on-premise networks with Windows Azure using site-to-site VPN. The service responsibel for this feature is called Windows Azure Gateway. It uses IPSec to establish a site-to-site VPN tunnel between your …

New Microsoft Solution Accelerator: Virtual Machine Converter

Microsoft Solution Accelerators are great tools that help you plan, securely deploy and manage new Microsoft technologies, and they are all free! Read more about Soltion Accelerators here. Recently a new solution accelerator to convert VMWare VMs and disks to Hyper-V was released. So now you really have no excues not to move to Hyper-V! …