Deploying SharePoint 2016 farm in Azure using Free Trial

There is a Azure blog post which talks about the high level phases involved in the deployment and points readers to a technet article which provides the details.  However, if you are using the Azure Free Trial, you will face a road block because of the max 4 core limitations per location enforced by Microsoft.

So what we can do is to change the design a little bit to successfully deploy SharePoint 2016 to Azure using Free Trial subscription for evaluation. Instead of deploying all 3 servers (AD, SQL & SharePoint) in a single location, deploy AD and SharePoint in one location and SQL in another location.

Steps

1. First, create 1 VNet in each location and connect them together. Steps here. But instead of putting 8.8.8.8 as the DNS server, put in the AD server IP. AD server is also the DNS server in this deployment.

2. Deploy the AD and SharePoint servers in 1 Vnet and SQL into the other VNet. Instead of opening SQL server ports as mentioned in the article, configure Inbound rules at NSG level for the second VNet (where SQL is deployed).

3. Follow the configuration steps as per the technet article.

4. Enjoy your evaluation. :-).

Puppet Master Inbound Security Rules

When configuring Puppet Enterprise Master v 2016.2, we need these following ports to be opened. The official documentation didn't mention this completely in a single place, so I thought of documenting it for easier reference.



The last one is for integration with GithHub. With this integration, any commits to GitHub can be pushed automatically to Puppet Master, ready to be deployed to its managed nodes.

Study Guide for Azure Certifications 70-533 and 70-534

I have got myself certified in both exams recently and would like to share with you on the various study resources that I used.

1. Azure Services is probably a good place to start.

2. edX free course on Architecting Microsoft Azure Solutions is the only free training available but I found it very informative. It will give you a broad overview on Azure and will help you to identify your blind spots.

3. For any topic that that you want to learn in more detail, just google for "Azure <title of topic>", you will most probably find the relevant article within the top of the search result. Beware of outdated blog discussions. Azure is being updated frequently so the best place learn and confirm about something is Documentation@Azure.

4. There are also many short but straight to the point videos at Azure Friday.

5. Practice makes perfect. If your organization is not using Azure, you can get a free subscription to check out for your self.

6. Last but not least, always keep yourself updated @ Azure Updates

Puppet ver 3.7.2 on Windows Azure - Issue 1

I was deploying a Puppet Enterprise 3.7.2 server on Azure the other day and encountered the below error when I try to access the Puppet master console after restarting the server.

Service Temporarily Unavailable
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to maintenance downtime or capacity problems. Please try again later.
Apache Server at XXXXXXXXX.cloudapp.net Port 443

The reason is stated in this ask puppet article, And the answer for this issue can be found in the same article in the answer section.

However, being a non-Linux person, I was a bit lost at first on how to at least manually fix the issue (restart the services). A lot of article gave generic Linux commands which didn't work for me. But thanks to Uncle Google, I found another article that showed how to start services in Ubuntu and managed to solved my issue.

Basically, 

1. ssh to your puppet master server

2. run the command below to identify the services that are currently running

             service --status-all

3. for me as the article listed, 4 services was down (minus symbol of the left of the services name)

4. run the commands below in the specified order one by one

           sudo service pe-puppet start

           sudo service pe-puppetserver start

           sudo service pe-postgresql start

           sudo service pe-console-services start


5. and try to access your puppet enterprise console again. it should work now :-)

Have fun!!