IamITgeek – aka Shabaz Darr

Tag: Infrastructure as a Service

Azure IaaS – Part 2 — March 25, 2019

Azure IaaS – Part 2

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Salaam, Namaste, Ola and Hello!

For those who are new to the blog welcome, and for those returning a big thanks! In my last blog ( https://iamitgeek.com/2019/03/20/azure-iaas ) I set the scene for a project I had recently where I was working with a customer who was unhappy with there on premises Infrastructure and had a set of requirements which I believed made them ideal for an Azure IaaS based platform.

I ended the first part of this two blog series at the point of implementing the proof of concept.  You may notice a pattern with most of the work I do in that where possible I look to do POC’s, and the main reason for it is to give the customer a feel and understanding of what the final platform will look like.  It gives them the confidence that what I am proposing works and is also a great way to iron out any issues before going live!  As I mentioned in the previous blog the POC 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.  We decided to implement the POC for staff only as we wanted to avoid causing any further disruption to the students.

Staff were able to utilise their existing thin clients and connect to the Azure based RDS instance via the site-to-site VPN on which we provisioned a set of pre-defined applications.  With the addition of email being hosted in Office 365, the platform was fully cloud based.  The feedback was 100% positive in that users were not having any of the same issues and pains that they felt with the current on premises Infrastructure.

Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t smooth sailing all the way!  We had to ensure the POC was as realistic as possible, so getting the customers application base working within Remote Desktop Services was a challenge and required us to work with 3rd party vendors of the apps to get them fully functional.

Once the POC was completed and signed off it was time to spec the live platform and get the solution priced up.  One of the better pricing tools is the ‘Azure Calculator’ which made putting the specs and pricing together quick and easy!  Due to the nature of this requirement that the resources required were pretty static, we decided to go with the Reserved Instance pricing model which reduced the monthly cost by 70% making the solution even more appealing to the customer.  “But with the Reserved Instance model you have to pay upfront for the instance so isn’t monthly billing” I hear you say?  Reserved Instances are available with monthly billing on a CSP platform which is something we were able to offer this customer!

Due to the state of the on premises Infrastructure rather than migrate the domain we provisioned a new domain and migrated the only the data.  This meant new AD accounts, new NTFS permissions and whole new beginning for this customer!  We used a 3rd party tool to migrate the email (a topic I will be blogging about very soon!) from the Exchange 2007 and Office 365 which was again seamless!

Since the platform went live last year the customer has given great positive feedback and has even agreed for us to do a case study on there story!

Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this two part blog of my experience with Azure IaaS  implementation/migration! Until next time, ‘I am IT geek’ over and out!

Azure IaaS – Part 1 — March 20, 2019

Azure IaaS – Part 1

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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.

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.

Azure IaaS – POC Overview

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!