Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Exam AZ-303: Microsoft Azure Architect Technologies Study Guide

I recently passed the AZ-303 exam. Below are some of the resources I used to prepare for the exam. In addition to the links below, I also used Alan Rodrigues' course on Udemy. 

https://www.udemy.com/course/az-102-azure-administrator-certification-transition/

The Udemy course and Microsoft Docs are enough to pass the exam. The course has some good practice exams and labs that align well with what you'll see on the real exam regarding difficulty. I was scoring in the high 90's on the Udemy exams. On the real exam, my score was 923. So, I think, if you comprehend the material well, and get high scores on Udemy practice exams, you'll do well on the real exam.

Just wanted to share my experience, hopefully it helps.

Implement and Monitor an Azure Infrastructure (50-55%)

Implement cloud infrastructure monitoring

Implement storage accounts

Implement VMs for Windows and Linux

Automate deployment and configuration of resources

Implement virtual networking

Implement Azure Active Directory

Implement and manage hybrid identities

Implement Management and Security Solutions (25-30%)

Manage workloads in Azure

Implement load balancing and network security

Implement and manage Azure governance solutions

Manage security for applications

Implement Solutions for Apps (10-15%)

Implement an application infrastructure

Implement container-based applications 

Implement and Manage Data Platforms (10-15%)

Implement NoSQL databases

Implement Azure SQL databases

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Thursday, November 26, 2020

Azure AD Sync - Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled : You cannot turn off Active Directory synchronization.

 I recently ran into a situation in my lab environment that required I resync all (2000+) user accounts to Azure AD. Though this sounds complex and daunting, its actually quite simple. T


he basic steps involve disabling sync, and then removing the user objects. This can all be done with two PowerShell commands:

1) Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled -EnableDirSync $false

    



2) Get-MsolUser -All | Remove-MsolUser -force

    


The account that you are currently running the commands as will not be removed. 

To enable Azure AD Sync, you simply reverse the boolean operation on the Set-MsolDirSyncEnabled cmdlet above. However, I ran into an issue when trying to enable Azure AD Sync. 


After some research, it turns out you must wait a period of time (up to 12 hours in some cases) before you can make a second change to the Azure AD Sync status. This error simply means that we made a recent change to Azure AD Sync, and we must wait before making another change. To prove this, there is a "DirectorySynchronizationStatus" member for the Get-MsolCompanyInformation cmdlet. If we take a look at this member, we can see the status is "PendingDisabled". 



Check the status of this periodically over the next 12 hours or so, and once it says "Enabled" or "Disabled", you should be able to change the state once more. 
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Thursday, November 19, 2020

Azure VM Scale Set - Get Instance IP Address

 

If you are using VM Scale Sets in Azure, you know how important it can be to quickly obtain an instance IP address. This can of course be done using the Azure Portal. However, I am often working in a shell or VSCode, and I do not want to leave the comfort of my shell to login to the portal.

There are a few options we have for retrieving information about a VMSS and its instances without using the Azure Portal. We can use PowerShell or the Azure CLI. Being that I am constantly flipping between Windows and Linux, I will detail both here.

 

You will need to have the AZ module installed. To install this module, simple open PowerShell (as admin) and type in “Install-Module -Name az”. To get the IP address of the instances within a scale set, use the following script:

https://github.com/rnemeth90/Get-VmssInstanceIpAddress

You can also use the Azure CLI to obtain individual instance IP addresses. This method is much simpler than PowerShell, and only requires one line of code:

az vmss nic list --resource-group myResourceGroup  --vmss-name myVmss | grep -w "privateIpAddress"

 

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