Puppet in Windows Azure

Few month ago Microsoft announced the availability of Azure VM images with Puppet agent installed.
Puppet is a piece of software useful to manage hundreds o thousands of machines from a single point of management.
Today, I have tested this feature and here are the notes, I hope they will be useful to you.

Testing Vagrant Azure provider

Last weekend I tried Vagrant-Azure, it is still a little bit unstable.
First of all, I did some tests with Vagrant and Virtualbox on Windows, following this URL, in this first test everything went fine, no problems.

Later, I wanted to use a Azure as provider and I had to install Vagrant-Azure Plugin https://github.com/MSOpenTech/Vagrant-Azure

VPN from CISCO ASA 5530 8.3(2) to Azure resets every 1 minute

We are working in a hybrid cloud solution, the first step is setting up the communications between our on premise servers and Azure.

We have at least one dozen of different network ranges in on premise network behind the ASA. 

We started the communication between on premise and Azure with one full /24 network and it worked fine, no problems at this point. So we added an extra HOST of different network and the problems began, we saw these messages in the ASA device log:

Lessons learned with a migration to Office 365

Today we are going to write about Office 365 and the recent migration of one of our clients.

Scenario:

• The client want to migrate their mailboxes from on premise Exchange servers to Office 365
• The client requieres password synchronisation (just an active directory sync, not federation or SSO)
• The client has Exchange 2003 and Office 2007
• The Exchange 2003 in our client's implementation is not standard
• The client wants a gradual migration to have time window to deploy Office 2013 on their computers in multiple stages.

Limit bandwidth between on premise and Azure with Cisco ASA

Here is a new recipe. We are working into a new hybrid cloud with Microsoft Azure and our offices. One of the requirements was the limitation of the bandwidth, between on premise servers and services in Azure servers, because we only have a  link of 20Mbps and this link has to provide access to clients and to our infrastructures in Azure. So we decided to limit the bandwidth to 8Mbps, between both sites. Here is the configuration example.

SCOM 2012 SP1 UR5 Failed

Today we have to update our management server from SCOM 2012 SP1 UR4 to SCOM 2012 SP1 UR5.

We have installed the KB 2904680 in the management server and after rebooting it, the Microsoft System Center Data Access Service started and died ten seconds later, generating the following errors in the event viewer under de Operations Manager log: