June

Azure bicep: Zero to Hero Course As a shameless plug, if you like the content you see here on Azure Bicep and are looking to further expand your skills, I’ve created an Azure Bicep: Zero to Hero course, which can be found here. Linting and Preflight Validation in Azure Bicep: Ensuring High-Quality Templates As you start building out your Azure Bicep templates, it’s crucial to ensure that your code adheres to best practices and patterns.

This is a really quick post to let followers / subscribers of the blog know that I have recently launched a newsletter. It’s been 2.5 years since I’ve posted here (oops!) and in that time, I’ve been working as an Azure DevOps Engineer. In my role I gain invaluable insights and knowledge that I’m eager to share with you. Through the newsletter, we’ll explore the latest trends, keep you updated on community happenings, and offer career tips to help you thrive in the cloud industry.

Introduction Microsoft recently released a PowerShell module named Az.Functions, providing cmdlets to manage the Azure Functions Service. According to the PowerShell Gallery, version 1.0.0 was released on the 19th of May, followed by 1.0.1 on the 23rd of June (2 days ago). Az.Functions is now included as part of the wider Az module, so if you install the entire Az PowerShell module, you’ll automatically receive Az.Functions. In this post, we’ll take a 101 look at some of the cmdlets that are included in this initial release.

I was recently chatting to a few guys regarding powering on and off VMs within a vSphere lab and using a script to do so in some sort of controlled manner (or force power off everything if desired). A few of us had a quick search, and couldn’t see anything that met the requirements of being able to power on and power off the lab, as well as place VMs into some sort of priority group.

Ahh, vSphere Host Profiles. My old friend. One of our customers recently had a hardware failure on one of their Dell M620 blade servers, and the server was repaired under warranty which included a motherboard swap. The server got inserted into the chassis and booted back up OK. The server was part of a 12 node cluster, so the customer tried applying the host profile, which would fail when it hit 22%.

OverView Back in vSphere 5 a new VAAI primitive called unmap was released. When using thin provisioned volumes or LUNs for VMFS datastores, actions such as storage vMotion, consolidating snapshots and deleting data (such as VMDK files) do not automatically reclaim the space on the underlying datastore. For example, if you have a thin provisioned 1TB datastore that has 2 x virtual machines using 400GB each, and you delete one of these virtual machines (using the ‘delete from disk’ action), the used space on the datastore will still report as 800GB.