Last week, Microsoft Azure Team has calmly announced the preview release of one of the exciting features known as Azure Bastion. The concept of using an Bastion Host is nothing new, where one would configure one of the Virtual Machines as Bastion or HopBox and then connect to other private virtual machines configured in the virtual network. This would help providing some security as instead of securely managing all of the virtual machines in an given network, you would need to securely connect and manage only Bastion Host, which is having Public IP address assigned for the connections. However, the onus of configuring all the required networking setup, installing and configuring ssh and rdp protocols, timely patching and hardening of the Bastion Host still lies with the Azure/AWS Administrator. Read More »
Tag: Azure Virtual Machines
Become root user on Linux servers in Azure
root is the user name or account that by default has access to all commands and files on a Linux or other Unix-like operating system. It is also referred to as the root account, root user and the superuser. The root account is the most privileged on the system and has absolute power over it (i.e., complete access to all files and commands). Among root’s powers are the ability to modify the system in any way desired and to grant and revoke access permissions (i.e., the ability to read, modify and execute specific files and directories) for other users, including any of those that are by default reserved for root.
It is therefore, many times, you need to login as root in order to perform certain administrative actions. Read More »
Creating an user account named administrator in Azure VM
We all know that while creating a virtual machine in Microsoft Azure (whether in classic or resource manager portal), it won’t allow to create an administrative user account named as ‘administrator’ at the time of provisioning. Not that its a good practice anyway and security pro’s have been advising to not create it from a long time. However some old legacy applications might not work if it does not exist. So once the virtual machine is provisioned, you can go ahead and create it fine using local users and groups console (or you can use shortcut lusrmgr.msc). Read More »
Enable PowerShell remoting on Azure RM virtual machines
PowerShell remoting is useful to manage virtual machines using PowerShell. When you create a virtual machine in the classic azure model, a winrm endpoint is automatically configured and can be used to manage virtual machines. You’ll just need to import ssl on your local machine and connect to the remoting session. However, same is not created if you create a virtual machine in the resource manager model. So if you try to connect using PowerShell remoting for azure rm vm, you’ll see Read More »
Query for unattached disks in Azure
To query for all windows unattached disks (which are not attached to any of the virtual machines), we can use below command:
Get-AzureDisk | Where-Object {($.OS -eq “windows”) -and ($.AttachedTo -eq $null)} | Select diskname
Same way you can find out for Linux related disks.
Deleting Azure Virtual Machines
Like other things, there are more than one way to delete Azure Virtual Machines. However with nearly all of them, you have a choice whether you want to delete vhds for the virtual machines or not. Sometimes it may be helpful to retain the disks for later use.
For delete virtual machine from classic portal, use below command:
$name = "mailserver01" $serviceName = "mailsouthasia" Remove-AzureVM -Name $name -ServiceName $serviceName
If we need to delete vhds as well, use below Read More »
Using Azure Automation to stop/start virtual machines
Today, we’ll see how we can leverage Azure Automation to stop/start virtual machines in Azure. We’ll begin with how to start virtual machine first and same steps can be applied to stop virtual machines. You’ll only need to change few commands in the runbook associated.
Login into Azure Resource Manager with your credentials. Click on Azure Automation account and then click on the runbooks section highlightedRead More »
Specifying custom virtual hard disk locations for Azure virtual machines
You can specify data disk location names while creating virtual machines using Azure PowerShell. This helps creating a consistent nomenclature which is helpful for your organization.Read More »
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