Moving forward with Nvidia GRID on Microsoft Azure

At AzureCon, Microsoft announced that they were partnering with Nvidia in order to deliver their GRID 2.0 architetucture on Azure. This will allow customers to easily access heavy GPU power within Microsoft Azure, and this is then most likely like other virtual machines in Azure be available at pr minute cost.

This NVIDIA grid architecture will be available for both Linux and Windows virtual machines and be available in a custom machine series called N-series

Microsoft is uses DDA (Pass-trough) which is a feature that Microsoft does not have available within their Windows Server version with RemoteFX. My guess is the N1 & N10 series is basically using RemoteFX and splitting the memory into 2 slots.

So does this mean that Microsoft is moving toward with GPU passtrough on regular Windows Server as well? Hope so!

Microsoft also mentioned that is being available on CLIENT OPERATING SYSTEM, does this mean VDI is coming on Azure?This is not available as of now, but will be coming in preview later this year.

So if you plan on delivering GPU capable terminal server based computing in Azure, you need to compentace for the latency and the support catapabilities of the remote display protocol. Hence you should look into Citrix and the latest achivements they have with Framehawk & HDX and that Netscaler is now available in Azure, go figure.

#azure-active-directory, #n-series, #nvidia-grid-azure

Azure AD Connect Preview 2 is available

As I’ve mentioned previously, looks like the Azure AD time is running on speed or Red Bull, anyways they are active! today they announced a new preview of their universal tool Azure AD Connect (Which is going to replace DirSync and AAD Sync)

So there are alot of new features in preview in this new Azure AD Connect like.

• User writeback

• Group writeback

• Device writeback

• Device Sync

• Directory extension attribute sync

So this means that there are more ways to deploy two-ways sync. Also it makes it easier for hosting providers to do onboarding for existing cloud partners to their existing to their on-premise Active Directory.

Now in order to use these features we need to do some changes to our active directory on-premise.

You can that the device and group writeback options are disabled until we run the PowerShell wizards.

First we need to locate the AdSyncADPrep module which are located under C:\Program Files\Microsoft Azure Active Directory Connect\AdPrep

Then import the module Import-Module «C:\Program Files\Microsoft Azure Active Directory Connect\AdPrep\AdSyncAdPrep.psm1

First to allow sync of Windows 10 devices which are joined to the local Active Directory

Initialize-ADSyncDomainJoinedComputerSync -ForestName contoso.com -AdConnectorAccount $psCreds -AzureADCredentials $azureAdCreds

AdConnectorAccount (Local active directory username and password)

AzureADcredentials (Azure AD username and password)

Then we need to define the writeback rule for those who are defined in Azure AD and define writeback

Initialize-ADSyncDeviceWriteBack -DomainName region.contoso.com -AdConnectorAccount $

Then for user-writeback to local active directory

Initialize-ADSyncUserWriteBack -AdConnectorAccount $psCreds -UserWriteBackContainerDN «OU=CloudUsers,DC=contoso,DC=com

Where the OU defines where the Azure AD users are going to be created in the local Active Directory. We can also define writeback in the wizard

#azure-active-directory

How to setup Azure Active Directory applications and Office365 dashboard

So this is something I’ve just recently gotten aware of. (Just comes to show that so much news is coming to EMS pack. But this feature is really usefull for customers which has Office365 and Azure Active Directory.

Now if you are familiar with the Azure AD application portal you know that here users can access their applications which we have defined for them.

Which might be SaaS applications, other Microsoft Azure AD based applications or on-prem apps using Application proxy. That great but the typical user might have Office365 as their start portal (start page) is there any way to show the apps there instead ? indeed!

So inside the application portal of Office365 you have a option here called myapps

If users click here they will get the apps available to them

And here I can choose to attach the application to the application portal for a user.

Great stuff! since this allows the user to have access to all their applications from within Office365.

#azure, #azure-active-directory, #office365