Azure IaaS – Part 1

Salaam, Namaste, Ola and Hello!

For those new to the blog welcome and to those who are returning a big thanks! This next series of blogs will be around Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and specifically a project I was technical lead on around a migration from on premises Infrastructure to Azure IaaS.

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Setting the Scene  – unfortunately this all came around due to an unhappy customer.  We have all been there and as I am sure any IT professional will agree an unhappy customer is not a great situation to be in.  This particular customer was a small educational institute with only about 30-40 users but close to 60 students.  The current Infrastructure consisted of two physical hosts, one with Hyper-V which hosted a few virtual machines including Domain controller, Exchange 2007, RDS and another physical file server.  Both staff and students used thin clients to connect to Remote Desktop services. Everything about the current solution was not right, with ageing hardware and a licensing model which was causing them more headache.

Now with a lot of these situations you would think this is easy…just upgrade the existing Infrastructure on premises and the jobs done! However there were many more factors to take into account, such as the customer had no local IT support to deal with issues when hardware onsite needed looking at or users needed help.  Other factors, and one of the biggest ones included budget, and wanting an Opex pricing model rather than a Capex model.

Around about the time the customer was having all these issues, I was spending a lot of lab time on Azure IaaS, in particular the compute and storage aspects when I had the light bulb moment…Azure IaaS is prefect!

I mean think about it…it takes away the headache of having hardware onsite, so with no local IT in place management becomes easy!  Azure IaaS is also monthly billing which meant no upfront investment and was ideal for the pricing model they wanted.

I took it upon myself to create a demo that consisted of an Azure VNET, an IPSEC site-to-site VPN from Azure to the customers on premises Infrastructure, two Azure VMs (Domain Controller/file server and RDS server) along with a small Office 365 tenancy and presented this to the customer.  The reaction and feedback was overwhelmingly positive, and we decided to put it in place as a POC for 10 users.

To find out how that went, along with how the Implementation and Migration went you will need to keep your eyes peeled for Part two of this series, so until next time, ‘I am IT geek’ over and out!