Building the future of Azure Stack HCI

by Contributed | May 30, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Introduction

Our customers want a simple way to bring the power of the cloud into their real-world operations to transform their businesses. At Microsoft, our goal is to give businesses the ability to project Azure to wherever they need it, whether it be the cloud, a data center, or an edge location like a retail store.

However, we know operating even modern hybrid cloud environments can be a complex undertaking.   An array of disparate tools and technologies acquired over time and space often leaves customers to stitch it all together themselves. Our aim is to reduce that complexity with Azure-consistent infrastructure that simplifies the ability to take advantage of cloud-native technologies at the edge.

As part of this ambitious vision, we are evolving our flagship hyperconverged infrastructure offering, Azure Stack HCI, towards an increasingly cloud-native posture that leverages Azure Arc to meet the ever-changing needs of our customers. The result is a solution for businesses that simplifies operations, and allows our customers to use the same tools, app models, and control planes uniformly regardless of where their data and applications reside.

How Microsoft delivers a seamless cloud to edge solution with Azure Stack HCI

Unified and consistent operations across environments

• Edge deployments are streamlined into a simplified turnkey experience driven centrally from the cloud, which minimizes the need for on-prem IT expertise.


• Updates are one-click for the entire technology stack, closing the seams between hardware, firmware, drivers, OS, and agents. All updates are comprehensively validated for compatibility, interoperability, and reliability.


• Support is at the solution level, providing a single point of contact experience for hardware, software, and cloud components.

Simplified application modernization

• Applications are developed once and deployed and managed equally across environments.


• Azure Arc-enabled Azure features and services such as Azure Kubernetes Services, Azure Virtual Desktop, Azure Arc-enabled data services, and Azure Arc-enabled VM Management easily extend from the cloud to the edge.

Centralized governance

• On-premises resources are easily accessed, managed, and governed centrally through the Azure Portal.


• Infrastructure is continuously monitored to ensure it stays in a validated state.


• Azure’s policy management, threat protection, and security controls extend to on-premises infrastructure.

Announcing Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure

To simplify the inherent complexity of cloud to edge, the unique breadth and depth of our partners extends Microsoft’s cloud services and software into customers’ environments around the world. With one of our key partners, we recently announced the Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, the first Azure Stack HCI solution of its kind, delivering integration and capabilities beyond the Validated Nodes and Integrated Systems in the Azure Stack HCI portfolio today.

Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Azure is the result of extensive engineering collaboration between Microsoft and Dell. It natively integrates with Azure Arc and Azure Stack HCI to provide a turnkey experience to customers, including simplified deployment, seamless management, and orchestration capabilities for hyperconverged infrastructure deployments. Building on Dell’s track record of delivering market-leading integrated infrastructure solutions with extensive software-driven management and orchestration (M&O) automation, this comprehensive solution enables IT admins and operators to focus less on managing the day-to-day operational tasks and more on innovation and achieving desired business outcomes. This integration gives customers a consistent operational model to run their application and data services across datacenter and edge and manage on-premises resources from the Azure portal with consistent security and governance.

Conclusion

We are excited for what’s to come with Azure Stack HCI as we keep building and transforming with our customers. To learn more about Azure Stack HCI, visit our page on Microsoft Learn.

For more information on Dell APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure, please visit Dell’s solution brief.

How to perform a REST API request in Azure using RBAC authentication with Postman

by Contributed | May 26, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This article describes how to perform a REST API request in Azure using RBAC authentication with Postman. I will use as example the Get Blob (REST API) request.

Please see below how to perform a REST API request in Azure using RBAC authentication:

1. Open the Azure Portal and go to Azure Active Directory.


2. On left side, please create a new App registration by clicking on App registration (left side bar) and then New registration. Fill in the Name and all the information required.


3. Inside the new app:
   
   
   
   1. Click on Overview and and collect the Application (client) ID value, and the Directory (tenant) ID value.
   
   
   2. Clink on Certificates & secrets and create a New Client Secret. Please collect the client secret value.
   
   
   
   


4. Open your storage account and go to Access Control (IAM) and assign to this App the RBAC role required to call any data access operation in Azure Storage. Please note the role assignment could take some time to take effect.
   
   
   
   1. For the example presented here (Get Blob request), we need to assign to the app need the following permission “Microsoft.Storage/storageAccounts/blobServices/containers/blobs/read“. The Storage Blob Data Reader RBAC role is the least privileged built-in role with this permission. This information can be found here: Get Blob (REST API) – Azure Storage
   
   
   
   


5. Open Postman and:
   
   
   
   1. Create a new request.
   
   
   2. Select the Authorization tab in the request builder window and:
      
      
      
      1. In the “Type” dropdown, select “OAuth 2.0”
      
      
      2. On the right side, please fill in the following fields:
         
         
         
         1. Token Name: A name of your choosing
         
         
         2. Grant Type: Client Credentials
         
         
         3. Access Token URL: https://login.microsoftonline.com//oauth2/v2.0/token where is the Directory (tenant) ID value collected on step 3.1 above.
         
         
         4. Client ID: The Application (client) ID value collected on step 3.1 above.
         
         
         5. Client Secret: The client secret value collected on step 3.2 above.
         
         
         6. Scope: For storage, use https://storage.azure.com/.default
         
         
         7. Client Authentication: Send as Basic Auth Header.
            
         
         
         
         
      
      
      3. Click in “Get New Access Token” and collect the Access Token.
      
      
      
      
   
   
   
   


6. To be able to execute the get blob request, we need to select the Headers tab in the request builder window and:
   
   
   
   
   1. Select the GET method request.
   
   
   2. Add the GET method request URI (https://myaccount.blob.core.windows.net/mycontainer/myblob)
   
   
   3. Add the header “Authorization“ with the value “Bearer <token>” where <token> is the value generated on the step 5.2.7 above.
   
   
   4. Add at least the two required headers x-ms-date and x-ms-version.
   
   
   5. Execute the request.
   
   
   
   

Disclaimer:

• These steps are provided for the purpose of illustration only. 


• These steps and any related information are provided “as is” without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.


• We grant You a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to use and modify the Steps and to reproduce and distribute the steps, provided that. You agree:
  
  
  
  
  • to not use Our name, logo, or trademarks to market Your software product in which the steps are embedded;
  
  
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Lesson Learned #356: Transaction log full in Azure SQL due to CDC job.

by Contributed | May 25, 2023 | Technology

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Today, we faced a service request where our customer got the following issue Msg 9002, Level 17, State 2, Line 8
The transaction log for database ‘2d7c3f5a-XXXX-XZY-ZZZ-XXX’ is full due to ‘REPLICATION’ and the holdup lsn is (194XXX:24X:1). Following I would like to share with you what was the lesson learned here.

We need to pay attention about the phrase “is full due to”, in this case is REPLICATION that means that could be related about Transaction Replication or Change Data Capture (CDC). 

In order to determine the situation, if we are not using Transaction Replication is to review if CDC is enabled running the following query: select name,recovery_model,log_reuse_wait,log_reuse_wait_desc,is_cdc_enabled,* from sys.databases where database_id=db_id() – sys.databases (Transact-SQL) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

If the value of the column is_cdc_enabled is 1 and you are not using CDC, use the command sys.sp_cdc_disable_db to disable the CDC job. sys.sp_cdc_disable_db (Transact-SQL) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

During the troubleshooting process during the execution of sys.sp_cdc_disable_db we got another error Msg 22831, Level 16, State 1, Procedure sys.sp_cdc_disable_db_internal, Line 338 [Batch Start Line 6]
Could not update the metadata that indicates database XYZ is not enabled for Change Data Capture. The failure occurred when executing the command ‘(null)’. The error returned was 9002: ‘The transaction log for database ‘xxx-XXX-43bffef44d0c’ is full due to ‘REPLICATION’ and the holdup lsn is (51XYZ:219:1).’. Use the action and error to determine the cause of the failure and resubmit the request. 

In this situation, we need to add more space to the transaction log file due there is not possible to register the disabling CDC operation in the transaction log. 

Once, we have more space in our transaction log, we were able to disable CDC and after disabling CDC, Azure SQL Database was able to marked as backup the Transaction Log.

Finally, in order to try to speed up the truncation of this transaction log we executed several times the command DBCC SHRINKFILE (Transact-SQL) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn  and we were able to reduce the file size of the transaction log file. 

Also, during the troubleshooting we used the following to see how many VLFs that we have and the space usage: sys.dm_db_log_info (Transact-SQL) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn and sys.database_recovery_status (Transact-SQL) – SQL Server | Microsoft Learn

SELECT * FROM sys.dm_db_log_info(db_id()) AS l
select * from sys.database_recovery_status where database_id=db_id()