Office 365 Evangelist

Today with great help from Catapult’s IT Manager, we setup a VPN connection between Catapult’s On-Premises network and the Windows Azure network. This is a very cool thing, it allows me to bridge our on-premises network and servers with servers hosted on Windows Azure IaaS. The entire setup and configuration was really not that bad. I first researched this and talked to my internal IT team about the possibility of setting this up. First think I checked was for supported VPN devices for the Windows Azure service, here is the list http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156075.aspx. Unfortunately Catapult does not utilize a Cisco or Juniper Networks VPN device. But this did not stop me, in the URL that listed the supported VPN devices it also lists out the requirements and our Catapult VPN device met all the requirements. Today we then went forward with the setup and configuration of the Windows Azure IaaS Virtual Network and Cross Premises Connectivity, http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/networking/cross-premises-connectivity/. This was pretty straight forward to setup (I do want to point out that some of the screen shots in the URL have changed, but not in any major way to prevent completion of the setup). A couple of important items:

• Networks cannot overlap, so ensure that your on-premises and IaaS network are completely separate
• AES 128 encryption is required, not 256, for the on-premises VPN device

Once we completed the setup and configuration we ended up with, Whola!

After getting the point to point VPN connection up and functioning I was then able to create a new VM in Windows Azure and connect it to the network, http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/networking/add-a-vm-to-a-virtual-network/ With this completed, I setup a second Site for this Server in my on-premises test domain and added the corresponding subnet to cover the IaaS network that was created. With this done I then installed ADDS into the IaaS server (built this as Windows Server 2012) and then promoted it as a domain controller into my test domain.

Now I have an on-premises domain controller and a domain controller hosted in Windows Azure IaaS. Over the next couple days my plan is to then enable ADFS on the IaaS domain controller and setup Identity Federation with my Office 365 Tenant.

So Today was a good day! I am right now sitting in the San Antonio airport waiting on a flight back home to Denver, but earlier today I got a chance to take a tour of the Microsoft Datacenter in the area! This opportunity was part of a joint event between Catapult Systems and Microsoft around Cloud Services. I spoke about Office 365 and the journey to the cloud, and a Microsoft Azure specialist talked about the Azure services. After we completely bored the audience we were all taken on an in-depth tour of the very impressive Datacenter. Very, very impressed with the facility overall and the team in charge on its care and management.

As a Microsoft Partner, I am under a companywide NDA, and to gain entry to the facility I had to sign two additional documents, one being another NDA; so at this time I am reluctant to provide any details of the tour, but am working with Microsoft to determine what I can say about the tour and will update this post with public information I can disclose. I will say this again, very impressed with the facility, the cleanliness, the attention to detail and the overall scale of the site!

One cool piece of information that was talked about in the Azure session was the information about the upcoming Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering coming later this year! After seeing the Datacenter I know this will be a huge success and a great way for companies to expand to the cloud and take advantage of Microsoft massive investment in Cloud Computing!

Hopefully more to come about the datacenter itself, just waiting on a few lawyers, Marketing people and the planets to align!

UPDATE:

I found some small tidbits that I am allowed to say about the datacenter from the Microsoft Site, http://www.globalfoundationservices.com  The GFS is the branch of Microsoft that designs, builds and runs the datacenters around the world for Microsoft.  here is a good overview about the San Antonio, TX dataceter,

http://blogs.technet.com/b/jweston/archive/2008/04/15/article-on-microsoft-s-san-antonio-s-data-center.aspx

The San Antonio, TX Datacenter covers almost 500,000 square feet of space.  This datacenter along with the other datacenters contain over 200 properties, or services, for Microsoft.  Really think of the GFS as the datacenter provider and the various online properties like Bing, Hotmail, Office 365, Azure, etc as tenants in these massive datacenters.  Really the GFC datacenter locations are actually just collocation facilities  for the over 200 online properties of Microsoft.

Sorry I can’t give you all the meaty details, but want to ensure I stay within my NDA.  I will say this, while the San Antonio datacenter was great to see, it is only a Gen 2 datacenter.  Microsoft is already rolling out Gen 4 datacenters that truly are module in every aspect!