August 2023 - eduardokieling.com

Azure Firewall’s Explicit Proxy feature (preview)

Hello Guys,

Azure Firewall is a cloud-native network security service that protects your Azure resources and applications. It operates in a transparent proxy mode by default, which means that traffic is sent to the firewall using a user defined route (UDR) configuration. The firewall intercepts that traffic inline and passes it to the destination.

However, there is another mode that you can use for your outbound traffic: Explicit proxy. This mode allows you to configure a proxy setting on the sending application, such as a web browser, with Azure Firewall acting as the designated proxy. This way, traffic from the sending application goes to the firewall’s private IP address and egresses directly from the firewall without the need for a UDR.

SMB shares to Azure file shares with Azure Storage Mover

Hello Guys,

If you’re seeking a seamless transition of your local files and folders to the cloud, or if you’re interested in the scalability, security, and performance benefits of Azure file shares, then the new feature of Azure Storage Mover could be just what you need. This fully managed migration service can assist you in migrating your SMB shares to Azure file shares with ease.

Azure Storage Mover is a hybrid service that consists of a cloud component and an agent component. The cloud component orchestrates the migration process and provides a user interface for creating and managing migration jobs. The agent component runs on your on-premises servers and performs the actual data transfer between your SMB shares and Azure file shares.

Azure Site Recovery for Shared Disks

Hello Guys,

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) is a service that helps you protect your workloads from disasters by replicating them to Azure or another region. ASR supports various types of workloads, including Windows Server Failover Clusters (WSFC) that use shared disks.

Shared disks are a feature that allows multiple VMs to access the same disk simultaneously, enabling scenarios such as SQL FCI, SAP ASCS, Scale-out File Servers, and more. However, replicating shared disks can be challenging, as they require consistency across all the VMs and disks of the cluster.

That’s why ASR has introduced a new feature in private preview: DR for Azure Shared Disks. This feature allows you to protect, monitor, and recover your WSFC-clusters as a single unit across its DR lifecycle, while also generating cluster-consistent recovery points.

In this post, we will show you how to use this feature and what benefits it offers.