Matt Quickenden 10/7/24 Matt Quickenden 10/7/24

HCI Box on a Budget. Leverage Azure Spot & Hyrbrid Use Benefits. Up to 93% savings.

Do you want to take HCI Box for a test drive but dont have $2,681 in the budget? Me either. How about the same box for $178?

Following general instructions from jumpstart Azure Arc Jumpstart

once you have the git repo, edit the host.bicep file

...\azure_arc\azure_jumpstart_hcibox\bicep\host\host.bicep

add to the properties for the host virtualMachine the resource vm 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines@2022-03-01'

priority: 'Spot'
    evictionPolicy: 'Deallocate'
    billingProfile: {
        maxPrice: -1
    }

You can review difference regions for either cheaper price per hour or lower eviction rate

If you are elegable for Hybrid Use Benefits through you EA or have licenses you can also enable HUB in the Bicep template under virtual machine properties

licenseType: 'Windows_Server'

Code changes

...
resource vm 'Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines@2022-03-01' = {
  name: vmName
  location: location
  tags: resourceTags
  properties: {
    licenseType: 'Windows_Server'
    priority: 'Spot'
    evictionPolicy: 'Deallocate'
    billingProfile: {
        maxPrice: -1
    }
...

Good luck, enjoy HCI’ing

Matt Quickenden 9/14/23 Matt Quickenden 9/14/23

Interesting changes to Arc Agent 1.34 with expanded detected properties

Microsoft just pushed out a change in Azure Arc Connected Agent 1.34 and with this comes some enrichment of Hybrid Servers detected properties.

This is what the properties looked like prior to the update.

Okay… so what’s new and different?

New detected properties for Azure Arc Connected Agent 1.34

serialNumber, ProcessNames and totalPhysicalMemory

resources
| where ['type'] == "microsoft.hybridcompute/machines" 
| extend processorCount = properties.detectedProperties.processorCount,
    serialNumber = properties.detectedProperties.serialNumber,
    manufacturer= properties.detectedProperties.manufacturer,
    processorNames= properties.detectedProperties.processorNames,
    logicalCoreCount = properties.detectedProperties.logicalCoreCount,
    smbiosAssetTag = properties.detectedProperties.smbiosAssetTag,
    totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes = properties.detectedProperties.totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes,
    totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes = properties.detectedProperties.totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes
| project name,serialNumber,logicalCoreCount,manufacturer,processorCount,processorNames,totalPhysicalMemoryInBytes,totalPhysicalMemoryInGigabytes

This unlocks organizations to collect processor, serial number and memory information in a simple fashion via Azure Arc infrastructure. This can be used to look at things like consolidation and migration planning, perhaps decommissioning aging hardware even warranty lookup if you don’t have current hardware CMDB.

Matt Quickenden 6/27/23 Matt Quickenden 6/27/23

SQL Counters via Azure Arc

Walk through how to collect SQL counter using Data collection Rule and displaying the results on a workbook an Azure Dashboard.

Microsoft is rapidly expanding the services and features available from the Azure Arc SQL Extension. As this moves into GA and more visibility features get added and importantly, features that allow actions EG controlling backup and even patching using Azure to create a management layer for your SQL Server estate outside of Azure becomes more viable.

Let’s take a brief look at grabbing SQL-specific performance counters to Azure Monitor Metrics.

We need to create a Data Collection Rule (DCR). I am not using Data Collection Endpoints (DCE), but you may want to consider this in your environment.

Select the Arc Resource you want to add

now we need to add some Performance counter

it will add a bunch by default; select None, then Custom to clear all.

Unfortunately, currently, you can not see the SQL counters from this view, so you’ll have to go collect what you want from another source.

You can use Perfmon, unfortunately you cant copy from perfmon.

this query will provide a list

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM sys.dm_os_performance_counters;

Here is a list I have extracted for this DCR

\SQLServer:General Statistics\User Connections
\SQLServer:General Statistics\Logins/sec
\SQLServer:General Statistics\Transactions
\SQLServer:Databases(_Total)\Active Transactions
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\Batch Requests/sec
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\Logical Connections
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\SQL Compilations/sec
\SQLServer:SQL Statistics\SQL Re-Compilations/sec

Paste it in line by line, Add, tick, Delete line, next counter. Adjust the Sample rate as needed. I have used the default 60 seconds. For large SQL servers estates, you might want to consider increasing this depending on your needs.

It’s worth considering building a template for this if you want to do this repeatedly. This resource type has some challenging layers to work through for deployment. Microsoft reference material can be found here.

we pipe these into Azure Monitor Metrics Which is still in preview and for this exercise I will also push the data into a log analytics instance.

as of this writing the metrics for hybrid compute fail to be added to scope of Azure Monitor. For the remainder of this example we will use Log Analytics Workspace for metrics.

Heading over to the Log Analytics Workspace. You can create various Kusto queries to integrate these SQL Metrics

Perf
| where ObjectName == 'SQLServer:General Statistics' and CounterName == 'User Connections'
| project TimeGenerated, Computer, ObjectName, CounterName, CounterValue
| summarize avg(CounterValue) by bin(TimeGenerated,60m) , Computer
| render timechart

You can send this to a Workbook or Dashboard

We can now see the data on a chart in a workbook. By saving the you can give the workbook a name and save it to a resource group

Alternatively, you can publish this to an Azure Dashboard. I am going to use the dashboard I created here Arc SQL Extension - Best Practices Assessment — Crying Cloud

This displays a tile here. You can continue to add tiles and edit the queries. You build workbooks and dashboards to target the specific metrics about your Arc-enabled SQL Servers.

Matt Quickenden 12/14/22 Matt Quickenden 12/14/22

Azure Arc delivers SQL Databases as Resources in Azure

The SQL extension for Arc-connected servers itself isn’t new, however, it has had a new feature added that is currently in preview; which is the ability to create Azure resources that represent your SQL Database through the Arc-connected Servers.

You can see this will detect objects for SQL instances, named SQL instances, and the databases themselves become objects in Azure

If you already have this installed this is one configuration setting you may want to check and that is “Has NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM in the sysadmin role.” This is listed in the prerequisites of the install instructions that can be found here View SQL Server databases - SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

It is worth noting this currently works only for the Microsoft.HybridCompute type and not for example the VMware connected Arc systems Microsoft.ConnectedVMwarevSphere.

There are some properties here listed as unknown however, this is a bug that has already been fixed.

This is the next step to bringing SQL databases into the Azure control plane, creating alerts on recovery models, encryption state, or perhaps statistic creation. Enabling more visibility and control into the Hybrid Cloud journey.

This is the first public preview of this feature and I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for future revisions and enhancements.

Matt Quickenden 11/22/22 Matt Quickenden 11/22/22

MAAS Image Builder Exclude Update by KB#

This briefly shows how to alter the image builder scripts to exclude broken KBs for specific OS versions. This example shows excluding Cumulative Update for Windows 11 Insider Preview (KB5019765) on an HCI image.

Trying to build a newer HCI Maas image and receive an error trying to download an update via release channel. Specifically, Windows 11 insider preview KB5019765

If you edit the Logon.ps1 found in the UnattendedResource folder from cloudbase/windows-imaging-tools: Tools to automate the creation of a Windows image for OpenStack, supporting KVM, Hyper-V, ESXi and more. (github.com) you can see there is a section that allows you to create a blacklist of KBs for different OS version.