Virtually There with Kevin Kaminski Episode 2: Ruben Spruijt

In this episode I catch up with fellow MVP Ruben Spruijt who has taken a CTO position over at Frame which is a cloud based virtual desktop vendor. Join me as I find out what Ruben and Frame have been up to in the VDI space.

Virtually There with Kevin Kaminski: First Episode!

  Before Microsoft Ignite I had an idea that I should bring a camera with me and interview different personalities in the IT business that I know and add them to my currently very small YouTube channel. The channel started with a couple of popular App-V videos, but I wanted to add some different content since I am often attending conferences and talking to my peers in the industry.

To kick off the series I've posted an interview with a co-worker and Microsoft MVP Marcos Nogueira. We chat about Azure and System Center along with the challenges customers face. To tune in just view the video below.

Azure Global Bootcamp with the Calgary Microsoft User Group

April 22, 2017, the Calgary Microsoft User Group held its first Azure Global Bootcamp event by holding a hands-on event about creating virtual machines. We had a well-attended event having over 30 people in the room.

The focus was about deploying Windows and Linux virtual machines in Azure using different management methods. We started off with the Azure Portal then moved into the Azure CLI and eventually Powershell to show the different ways that Azure can be managed.

We plan to hold more hands-on Azure events as they are very popular with the group. We'd like to thank our sponsors that helped make this event a success and contribute to ensuring that we can do future events!

AMTRA Solutions
Microsoft
Opsgility
myget
SentryOne
Jet Brains
CloudMonix
SentryOne
ServiceBus360

Curious About Modern VDI?

For the latest set of MVPDays events in Western Canada, I had the opportunity to speak about VDI. The MVPDays team was really on the ball this time around to record some of the presentations, so I had the opportunity to have my video posted to Microsoft's Channel 9. It was a great time to reconnect with fellow MVPs and customers in Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver. Hope to do it again next year.

The session looks at how new hardware, software and the cloud is changing the world of VDI. Many smaller organizations have found traditional VDI to be too complex and expensive to adopt while enterprises have struggled to manage it. In this session, I have an overview of some of the modern challenges facing VDI and the options you have to overcome it.


I will review some of the latest trends in hardware to create easy to deploy VDI environments on-premises and look at how the cloud is simplifying the design and operation of VDI. I also explore other technologies at the software level that manage the VDI environment from the hypervisor all the way up to the user data. It has been a long journey for VDI, but I believe we finally see cost effective solutions that make a stronger case for organizations to phase out traditional desktop computing devices.

Azure RemoteApp & App-V: Cloud Service vs Resource Manager

I've been playing around with Azure RemoteApp and App-V in Azure to find a nice little limitation that I think is a huge design consideration. Lately I've been deploying my virtual machines with Azure Resource Manager because it is the future platform and it offers many features not available in the Azure Cloud Services model. The main attraction to me is network security groups where I can essentially configure a network level firewall for different systems in Azure. But more importantly is the Resource Manager Templates, these allow you to build environments in Azure that can be exported to templates so that they can be easily provisioned for development, test and production environments.

The issue I wish to discuss is about a limitation many of you may not be aware of unless you try to deploy RemoteApp and require connectivity to servers in Azure Resource Manager. The first limitation is that the Azure RemoteApp servers must reside on a different virtual network than the servers provisioned using Azure Resource Manager. There can be no sharing of VNet address space between models. The most interesting part is that these virtual networks do not communicate to each other by default which creates the most challenging piece of the problem.

In order to provide connectivity between virtual networks you will need to implement a VPN between virtual networks. This means your bandwidth between networks will be constrained to 100 megabits (basic and standard) to 200 megabits (high speed) depending of the gateway you are using inside of Azure.

If you are deploying App-V Management Servers in Azure and want the best performance I would recommend that you deploy those virtual machines using Cloud Services for the short term. You may also want to keep this in mind with the supporting application infrastructure because the gateway could get congested with that traffic as well.

Here are some links as to help you with configuring the VPN if you need to pursue this architecture.

Connecting classic VNets to new VNets

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-networks-arm-asm-s2s/

About VPN gateways

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/vpn-gateway-about-vpngateways/