This blog will showcase how to deploy an Azure VM that has a configured Microsoft SQL Instance that is connected to a Cloud Block Store (CBS) volume. I have previously showcased VM & CBS deployments with both Powershell and Terraform, but its time to bring it to a new language!

Welcome to another blog on Automation! This one will be focused on deploying resources in Azure using Bicep. Follow along to understand what Bicep is and my thoughts on it.

Previously, I covered how to Deploy and Bootstrap an EC2 Instance in AWS using Terraform. Not everyone may use Terraform, but quite a few people are using PowerShell today. Lets take a Look at how we can use AWSPowerShell to deploy an EC2 instance in AWS.

As a followup to my previous post on Automating EC2 deployments, I figured why not show how this can also be done with Microsoft Azure? Check out how to launch an Azure VM instance and run some scripts to customize your installation.

As part of demonstrating our products to customers, I tend to reprovision EC2 instances to show how easy it is to mount data in AWS to Cloud Block Store. After doing this manually a little too often, I figured why not automate it? Check out this blog on how I use Terraform to deploy a EC2 instance and configure it for in-guest iSCSI.

I have been knee deep in migrations, so after clicking through a few times to create clustered file shares, I finally decided to script them. Here is that script I thought I would share. Thanksfully there was the NTFSSecurity module published by microsoft that makes permissions a breeze. You can get more details by viewing the module page.

Pre-Requsites

• NTFS Security Module

Link to Script

• Create-SMBShare.ps1

Preparing to Execute the Script

Fill in the appropriate variables, and execute the script.

So I am in the process of rolling out a new 2012R2 DHCP Server Cluster, and I thought i would share my scripts with the community.

I have also rolled it into a Vagrant package so you can easily test it on your own, and execute the scripts by themselves against your environment to deploy.

Here is a link to the GitHub repository containing all the code.

The code is also fairly simple, it pulls in data from a few .CSV files and deploy’s the servers, installs the roles, creates the scopes, creates MAC Address allow policies and then creates a couple reservations.

So upon trying to install .Net 3.5 on a new server today it would not allow me to, it kept telling me the source files were unavailable even after pointing to source directly to multiple ISO’s and copied the files locally.

Upon further research I stumbled across this microsoft KB article and used it to ultimately find my fix. KB2734782

Here are the full steps I followed to get .NET installed.

1. Open gpedit.msc to modify your local group policy.

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