Implementing 70-533 - Objective 2 - Create and Manage RM VM's (20-25%)

Deploy workloads on Azure Resource Manager (ARM) virtual machines (VMs)

1. Only VHD's are supported in Azure, VHDX must be converted first
2. Azure Linux agent is used to prep the VM to be used as an image
3. To connect to a VM look at the Endpoints. Endpoints lists public and private ports exposed by VM
4. Sharepoint workloads are supported in Azure; Hyper-V and Windows Deploy Service are not 
5. Convert-VHD>Add-AzureVHD>Add-AzureVMImage>New-AzureVM to recreate an on premise VM in Azure

Perform configuration management

1. Publish-AzureVMDscConfiguration for desired state configuration 
2. Chef configuration extension allows configuration of VM's and gives the ability to amend the configuration at a later date 
3. Chef client can be installed only when a VM is created 
4. Use PowerShell to add Chef client to an existing maching 
5. Chef allows you to use Ruby and Erlang to perform configuration tasks 
6. Puppet uses proprietary OO language with JSON like features 
7. Use Update-AzureVM to update a VM's configuration after applying a DSC script 
8. Puppet can connect by PowerShell and RDP by default but not over the internet unless you create an Endpoint 
9. Enable the VM Agent and allow the VM to run custom script extensions to execute PowerShell cmdlets against your VM. 
10. Powershell cmdlets execute from your storage account 
11. Get-AzureVM to retrieve an instance of a VM configuration 
12. Set-AzureVMCustomScriptExtension to set a custom script that can be downloaded from your storage account when provisioning the VM 
13. Set-AzureVMExtension 'VMAccessAgent' to reset a password 
14. Set-AzureVMExtension 'CustomScriptExtension' to allow a custom script 
15. Set-AzureVMExtension 'Bginfo' to allow custom BGInfo desktop background 
16. Know the sections of a Powershell DSC script block - Configuration, Resource, Name 
17. Use Azure Virtual Machine Extensions to troubleshoot DSC configurations locally 

Design and implement VM storage

1. The default replication scheme for an Azure storage account is Geo-Redundant which replicates data six times 
2. Locally redundant storage replicates storage three times 
3. ZRS is only available to store block blobs not page blobs, VHD's use page blobs 
4. To create a share with PowerShell first set the account and key with New-AzureStorageContext, then the share can be created with New-AzureStorageShare 
5. When deoploying a domain controller to Azure set the cache preference to none 
6. Azure Files is an SMB 2.1 compliant 60 MS/sec throughput and max file size 1 TB 
7. Azure BLOB only supports 200 GB / block BLOB 
8. Azure data disk can only connect to 1 VM not multiple 
9. Host disk caching for attached disks can be set to None, ReadOnly, ReadWrite adn is set to None by default 
10. Set-AzureDataDisk is used to configure the host-cache mode 
11. VHD's must be stored as page blobs in Azure to be listed as a custom image 
12. You configre an Azure Site Recovery vault in Azure portal, you configure Azure Site Recovery Provider on the servers 
13. Know the Get-AzureVM parameters, use Get-AzureVM to Add-AzureDataDisk. This is then followed by Update-AzureVM to commmit the changes 
14. Use Set-AzureDataDisk to modify the data disk attached to a VM 
15. Use Set-AsureDataDisk with HostCaching parameter = ReadWrite to cache data that is frequently written 
16. Use the File service option with a new storage account to share network volumes on the network 
17. Table service and DocumentDB are both NoSQL options 

Monitor ARM VMs

1. Azure alert rules can be used to send email alerts 
2. Endpoints can be used to monitor a cloud service from up to 3 locations 
3. Metrics allow you to choose what to monitor 
4. Rules are used to generate a notification when a monitored metric exceeds a threshold 
5. When you Configure endpoint monitoring you specify two endpoints and up to two test locations for each endpoint 
6. An IaasDiagnostics resource is added to the Virtual Machine ARM template file 
7. Connect to VMDiagnoseStorageAccount to browse tables to see Windoes event logs 
8. VMStorageAccount is where the VHD is stored 

Monitor ARM VM availability

1. All VM's in the same availability set participate in failover 
2. Each availability set contains five upgrade domains and two fault domains 
3. An upgrade domain is a logical group of instances for upgrading a VM 
4. A fault domain groups VMs by hardware 
5. Azure places VM's in upgrade and fault domains automatically 
6. In a scale set VM's will automatically be assigned to seperate fault domains so they will have seperate power sources 
7. Availability sets have 99.95 percent SLA 
8. Traffic manager supports round robin load balancing across data centers 

Scale ARM VMs

1. VM Scale Sets are used to deploy identical virtual machines 
2. Azure automation framework can be used to vertically scale VMs in response to workload 
3. VM Scale Sets are deployed with ARM templates 
4. The ARM teamplate capacity property is used to add or remove VMs in a scale set, threshold metric to trigger a CPU scale action 
5. When resizing VM's in an availability set you need to stop and restart all servers in the availability set