Tag: SQL

Technical Review: Practical Automation with PowerShell

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find a standout book on PowerShell in today’s crowded market. I’m sure everyone is familiar with such books as:

  • “Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches” (best for newbies)
  • “Learn PowerShell Scripting in a Month Lunches” (best for learners).
  • “Windows PowerShell in Action” (best handbook)

Let’s assume you have read the first two and are trying to find the next one to completely master PowerShell skills, get more practice, and gain insights. Allow me to introduce “Practical Automation with PowerShell” by Matthew Dowst.

Surprisingly to me, this book became my favorite (despite having read several bestsellers, some of which are mentioned above), and I thoroughly enjoyed both reading and reviewing it. The main reason is its comprehensive table of contents, which addresses everything one encounters on a daily basis: automation of clouds, on-premise servers, databases, and other essential tasks.

Click to see TOC
  • 1. POWERSHELL AUTOMATION
  • 2. GET STARTED AUTOMATING
  • 3. SCHEDULING AUTOMATION SCRIPTS
  • 4. HANDLING SENSITIVE DATA
  • 5. POWERSHELL REMOTE EXECUTION
  • 6. MAKING ADAPTABLE AUTOMATIONS
  • 7. WORKING WITH SQL
  • 8. CLOUD-BASED AUTOMATION
  • 9. WORKING OUTSIDE OF POWERSHELL
  • 10. AUTOMATION CODING BEST PRACTICES
  • 11. END-USER SCRIPTS AND FORMS
  • 12. SHARING SCRIPTS AMONG A TEAM
  • 13. TESTING YOUR SCRIPTS
  • 14. MAINTAINING YOUR CODE
  • APPENDIX A: DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT SET UP

The book teaches you how to design, write, test and maintain your scripts. If you work as a part of team – this book is also for you: “Handling sensitive data” and “Sharing scripts among a team” chapters are awesome and extremely helpful. Additionally, it covers integration with Jenkins, Azure Automation and Azure Functions. Consequently, after reading the book, you will be able to execute automations in mixed environments with different sets of services.

I highly recommend this book to anyone passionate about PowerShell. However, if you’re just starting out, I suggest beginning with “month of lunches” books before diving into this one to refine your skills and develop an automation engineer’s mindset.

Kudos to the author for an excellent work!

Disaster recovery for Azure IaaS VMs

Every organization needs a business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR)  strategy to keep data safe and react to unplanned or planned outage in the best way. Azure Site Recovery (ASR) significantly simplifies these processes providing replication, failover and failback functionalities for your major IT systems.

azure site recovery for azure vms_6

ASR can be used in the following scenarios:

  • VMware VMs replication to Azure w/CSP (uses InMage Scout software)
  • Physical servers to Azure (uses InMage software as well)
  • VMware VMs/Physical servers to a secondary site (through InMage Scout)
  • On-premises Hyper-V VMs without VMM to Azure (Hyper-V Replica inside)
  • On-premises Hyper-V VMs with VMM to Azure (Hyper-V Replica inside)
  • On-premises Hyper-V VMs with VMM to a secondary site (Hyper-V Replica inside)
  • Multi-Tier applications (uses SQL AlwaysOn AG, for instance)

But yesterday Microsoft officially extended this list by adding possibility to replicate Azure IaaS VMs running on Windows/Linux to another region within the same geographic cluster.

Now, you may ask, why we need this if Azure already provides high-availability and reliability for every business critical workloads. Official statement says that it’s required by ISO 27001 and it’s compliance requirements.

Furthermore if you’d like to be able to completely meet BCDR strategy in the event of disaster and you are not happy with built-in Azure protection features – new option can also help (seamless failover and failback between different regions to keep RTO/RPO very low)

TIP: the following demo was done with public preview version. Currently, this feature is GA and might be some things are bit changed

azure site recovery for azure vms_1

Demo

As usual, you need to create ASR vault  and enable replication for workloads. You should place ASR Vault at the TARGET location/region to make it work (wizard also checks it automatically).

It’s simple..if source location is down, ASR vault and resource groups will be also offline and your BCDR strategy will be failed –> ASR vaults should be always in the target region

I‘m using ASR created in UK West region and my workloads are running in West Europe DCs. Regions are in the same geographical cluster (Europe).

TIP: new managed disks and VMs scale sets are not supported + temporary disks always excluded from replication

azure site recovery for azure vms_3

You don’t need to prepare target infrastructure. ASR does almost all “dirty”” work by itself (network mapping, target networks/groups and storage/cache accounts + availability sets if they are in use in the source region) Continue reading “Disaster recovery for Azure IaaS VMs”