Azure Virtual Desktop: Which clients and client versions are in use?

On rare occasions, a bug might slip into the Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) clients. When that happens, it is highly relevant to know which clients and specific client versions your users are using to connect to the session hosts. Assuming you have enabled diagnostic settings on your host pool* (you really should!), the KQL query … Continue reading Azure Virtual Desktop: Which clients and client versions are in use?

Azure App Service Using a Custom Domain Name in a Private Namespace

Most Azure customers use App Service to host web sites and applications that are available on the public Internet. However, there are use cases for using the PaaS features of App Service only from your private network. Traditionally in Azure, you would have used an App Service Environment (ASE) for that purpose. With ASE v3 … Continue reading Azure App Service Using a Custom Domain Name in a Private Namespace

On-Demand Malware Scanning for Azure Storage Blobs with VirusTotal

I've recently been engaged on several customer projects where file uploads to an Azure Storage account have to be scanned for malicious content. Usually, this functionality is needed to ingest data safely into an Azure-hosted research environment. In this post, I am describing a solution I designed to scan the uploads for malware using the … Continue reading On-Demand Malware Scanning for Azure Storage Blobs with VirusTotal

End-to-End Configuring a RHEL 8 Common Event Format Forwarder for Sentinel

Update 2021-01-13 9:15 AM CST: Added additional resources at the end of the article Update 2021-03-23 2:31 PM CDT: Added additional firewall configuration for port 514 and additional SELinux configuration. Update 2021-10-24 3:11 PM CDT: I have a GitHub repo with Azure Bicep templates to build a single or multiple syslog forwarders in high availability … Continue reading End-to-End Configuring a RHEL 8 Common Event Format Forwarder for Sentinel

Defaulting Azure Virtual Network Peering from Allowing to Denying Traffic

I thought about making the title of this blog post "Creating a uni-directional Azure Virtual Network Peering," but it would have been a bit too click-baity. Still, conceptually, what I am describing in this post is along those lines. Virtual Network Peering and the VirtualNetwork Service Tag When two Virtual Networks (VNets) are peered, the … Continue reading Defaulting Azure Virtual Network Peering from Allowing to Denying Traffic

Does Deleting an Azure Managed Disk Also Delete Snapshots?

TL;DR: No. I've been working with numerous customers on Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) deployments since I started my position at Microsoft. During the process of manually* creating an image, it's common to take snapshots. I especially recommend taking snapshots before sysprepping the image. Once you sysprep an Azure VM, the VM itself is unusable; it … Continue reading Does Deleting an Azure Managed Disk Also Delete Snapshots?

Azure Resources for Education

My peers and I work with customers one-on-one, but we also provide "shared" resources. I thought it'd be helpful to share what these resources are. If you're an education IT pro and work with Azure, I am sure you'll find something on this list that will help you do your job more effectively.

Azure SQL DB: The specified failover group name is already in use

File this in the category of error messages that don't really mean what you think. When configuring a failover group using Azure SQL DB, you need to provide a "name" for the failover group. However, the name really becomes the FQDN of the failover group, but that's not directly obvious. The implication of that is … Continue reading Azure SQL DB: The specified failover group name is already in use