Expertenwissen von Marcel Meurer

Seit 2003 arbeite ich für die sepago GmbH in Köln. Als ausgebildeter Ingenieur für Elektrotechnik war und ist IT das, was mich bewegt und motiviert. Dabei sind 16 Jahre eine lange Zeit – in der IT immerhin mehrere Generationen. Spannend bleibt es aber immer. Ein besonderes Momentum, wenn nicht sogar eine Evolution, ist die Nutzung der Cloud und der Fokus auf das Wesentliche. Statt IT-Infrastrukturen zu planen und zu betreiben liegt heute der Fokus auf das Umsetzen von Ideen.

From 21. to 22. April the annual Cloud and Datacenter Conference took place in Hanau/Frankfurt in Germany. It’s one of my favorite community events in Germany. This year I was allowed to contribute something to RDS in Windows Server 2019 and Windows Virtual Desktop – including Windows 10 Multi Session Host and FSLogix (an awesome combination).

I published my slides to slideshare.net: https://de.slideshare.net/MarcelMeurer/rds-windows-virtual-desktop-desktop-in-2019

My demos are also available via youtube:
Windows Virtual Desktop –

Publishing own solutions to the Azure Marketplace seems to be very easy by using the documentation on https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/marketplace/marketplace-publishers-guide. To avoid any pitfalls I wrote down some insights about my first approach. In this blog, I will focus on “Azure Applications”

The Cloud Partner Dashboard

Make sure that you have access to the Cloud Partner Portal at https://cloudpartner.azure.com. In my case, I use my coopered credentials to log in.
Assign your Dev Center account details via Publisher Profile:

Hint:
I had some trouble doing this.

I spent hours today adding Azure AD authentication to an Azure MVC web application with Visual Studio. I always got the same error while adding the preconfigured AD application:

“Error: Unable to query for Azure AD applications: An error occurred while processing this request.”

My account has the right permission in Azure AD – I thought. After a while I found out: Visual Studio was connected to my Azure AD with three different accounts:

Normally,

Introduction

Microsoft offers with Log Analytics a cloud-based big data service. Log Analytics is used by several services (including Azure itself) to log and analyze data. It’s a core component of Azure Monitor and Application Insights.

Log Analytics key facts:

•  Cloud-based
• No data aggregation
• Pay per upload and data retention
• Powerful query language (kql: <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/kusto/>)
• Direct support for visualization on portal.azure.com

I use Log Analytics for several projects where data aggregation and analyzation are main tasks.

A few weeks ago, I started an IoT project with a company responsible for a huge amount of different buildings around the world. We deployed several virtual and physical sensors in Azure IoT Hub. Doing this we had three challenges:

• Deploy new IoT devices in Azure IoT hub in a batch
• Generate SAS tokens for these IoT devices
• Generate SAS tokens even if a device still exist in Azure IoT Hub

The requirement of batch processing avoids the use of the Device Explorer to generate SAS token.

More than two years ago, I created my PowerShell module to access OneDrive. This module can be installed with a one-liner from https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/OneDrive

Again, I was asked to support OneDrive for Business and finally, I’m ready: From version 2.0.0 OneDrive for Business is supported.

I provide the complete documentation on GitHub, where I will maintain it: https://github.com/MarcelMeurer/PowerShellGallery-OneDrive

Here is the summary of version 2.0.0:

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The OneDrive PowerShell module is available via PowerShellGallery.com.

Recently I got some questions on how to work with my PowerShell module for OneDrive. Therefor, I put together some examples.

Remember: The OneDrive module is for OneDrive personal and doesn’t work with OneDrive business / Sharepoint.

First: Register an app (authentication) for OneDrive: https://www.sepago.de/blog/onedrive-powershell-module-new-version-with-improved-authentication/

Authenticate to OneDrive

Show files and folders

Create new folder in OneDrive

Copy files from local to OneDrive

Copy file from OneDrive to local disk

Delete file in OneDrive

Azure OMS Log Analytics is often used by Azure services. Unfortunately, Azure AD audits and sign-ins are not configurable for log analytics now (I bet this will change soon). But for now, we must work around to archive this.

My favorite way is:

Sending audit logs and sign-ins to event-hubs -> collecting event-hub data from Logic Apps -> transferring data to Log Analytics

Step-by-step
Creating an Event Hub namespace

Create a new event hub namespace in Azure with the Azure Portal.

Sharing access across different tenants in one of the key benefits of Azure AD. My customers appreciate that they can provide Azure-based solution to their cooperated users and to guest users as well. Cooperated users include users from the group and subsidiaries. They all can access resources with one identity – on-premises and in the cloud (Same-sign-on, single-sign-on).

Guest users can be deployed manually via the Azure portal, via PowerShell or with a connector to another system (like SAP HR).