legi, intellexi

As of October 2016 to join Windows 10 computers to Azure AD Domain service requires these steps: Create a VNET in the classic portal . The VNET must be placed to a region where Azure AD domain service is available (( https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/regions/services/ )  In the classic portal  go to Directory -> Configure and enable the domain service. And wait for ~ 30 min When completed the IP address will be populated Go back to the VNET configuration and add a DNS server with the IP (10.0.0.4 in this case) Create the "AAD DC Administrator" administrators group (again in Directory -> Group). Members of this group are granted administrative privileges on machines that are domain-joined to the Azure AD Domain Services managed domain. Add to the group your users who are supposed to have the administrative access on a Windows 10 computer go to Settings -> Accounts (this is true for Windows 10 version  1607) then select 'Access...

Microsoft Azure offers the standard and active geo-replication capabilities for Azure SQL databases.  This feature implements a mechanism to provide database redundancy within the same Microsoft Azure region or in different regions (geo-redundancy). Active Geo-Replication asynchronously replicates committed transactions from a database to up to four copies of the database on different servers.  When Active Geo-Replication is configured a secondary database is created on the specified server. The original database becomes the primary database. The primary database asynchronously replicates committed transactions to each of the secondary databases. While at any given point, the secondary database might be slightly behind the primary database, the secondary data is guaranteed to always be transactionally consistent with changes committed to the primary database. When you place the secondary database on a server in a different region you add maximum resilience to your appl...

Microsoft on January 8th announce availability of a new series of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series. According to Microsoft "G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud". I decided to run a series of CPU-intensive tests on a G2 VM (4 cores, 56 GB) created in the West US region. For the test I used 7-zip (64-bit, v 9.20) to compress these 8 text files.            106,624 ConfirmedDates.txt            137,160 DataLoadTracking.txt        684,637,229 DEfile.txt      4,456,322,407 DEMfile.txt      1,951,333,329 EPfile.txt         12,975,399 ProgramTitle.txt      2,303,480,896 SWDfile.txt     24,168,394,643 SWOfile.txt Compression mode was  configured (in the '-...

Microsoft has recently added a new G-series of VMs built on  the latest Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family with plenty (up to 6.5 TB0 of  local Solid State Drive (SSD) space. Microsoft has also made available (in preview mode) the latest Azure SQL Database V12 which provides nearly complete compatibility with the Microsoft SQL 2014 Server engine and promises better performance (in the Premium level). I've decided to run my simple OLTP test against the database created: on the local instance of SQL 2014 with data and log files placed on the SATA hard drive (labelled below as DELL (HDD)) on the local instance of SQL 2014 with data and log files placed on the SSD drive (labelled below as DELL (SSD)) on the SQL 2014 installed within a G2-series VM (4 cores, 56 GB) with data and log files placed on an attached 100 GB drive (labelled below as Azure G2) on the SQL 2014 installed within a G2-series VM with data and log files placed on a virual disk create...

In the previous post  I ran the test with 5 concurrent clients and in this post I present results fgenerated by the same test but executed with different numbers of concurrent users: Azure SQL databases Standard (S0, S1, S2) and Premium (P1, P2, P3) editions were used During all test only a single Azure SQL database existed on the server at any given time The tests were executed for 200 seconds with 1,2,3,5, and 10 concurrent clients and after completion the test for a given number of the concurrent users all tables were dropped and re-created  Three tests were executed for each edition and number of concurrent users and the average number of transactions was calculated for the table below After completion the tests against a particular database edition the database was dropped and a new one was created in the next edition and/or tier (e.g., when all 5 tests have been completed against the S0 database that database was dropped and a new one was created in the S1 editio...

As of now Azure allows creating SQL Databases in three tiers - Basic, Standard, and Premium. The Basic tier has a single performance level with 5 DTU ( Database Throughput Units ) The standard tier has three levels - S0 (10 DTU), S1 (20 DTU), and S2 (50 DTU). And the Premium tier has also three levels - P1 (100 DTU), P2 (200 DTU), and P3 (800 DTU). To compare performance I created a test database in each tier and performance level. The test itself is the same as the one used in one of my previous blogs : The test was running from 5 clients for about 280 seconds and doing the following: - drop and create the test table - generate a random ID - integer within the [0, 2000000] range - if a table has no row witch such ID then insert a new row - if there is a row with such ID then update the row with the UpdateTime and a new DummyText (randomly generated length) The results clearly show that the higher DTU the more transactions per second the database can handle. ...

How powerful Azure VMs are in regard to CPU intensive operations (e.g., file compression)? I decide to compare Azure VMs with my DELL M4700 laptop for file compression operations. I created one VM of size A6 in the US-East2 region. Size A6 means 4 CPUs, 28 GB of RAM, and 127 GB on the system drive. The second VM has size D4 in the US-East region. D4 is a newly announce type of VMs that comes with SSD disks presented as drive D: (non-persistent drive). The D4 size has 8 CPUs', 28 GB of RAM, and 400 GB of the temporary drive D: (backed by SSD disks). Both VMs report the same CPU information Caption           : Intel64 Family 6 Model 45 Stepping 7 DeviceID          : CPU0 Manufacturer      : GenuineIntel MaxClockSpeed     : 2200 Name              : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 0 @ 2.20GHz SocketDesignation : None On my DELL M4700 laptop the CPU information is Ca...