• Azure Active Subscription (https://portal.azure.com/)

• Basic Scripting

Introduction to Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) serve as the backbone of countless applications and services hosted on Microsoft’s cloud platform. Offering unparalleled flexibility and scalability, Azure VMs empower businesses to deploy a wide range of computing solutions, from simple web applications to complex enterprise workloads. These virtualized instances provide on-demand access to computing resources, enabling organizations to swiftly adapt to fluctuating demands without the overhead of managing physical hardware. With Azure VMs, users can choose from a diverse selection of operating systems and configurations, tailoring their environments to meet specific requirements. Whether for development, testing, or production environments, Azure VMs offer a reliable and cost-effective solution for modern cloud computing needs. By automating VM startup and shutdown we can not only optimize the cost but our workloads too.

Importance of Automation in VM Management:

Automating virtual machine (VM) management tasks is crucial for modern cloud environments like Azure. With the ever-growing scale and complexity of cloud deployments, manual management becomes impractical and error-prone.By automate VM startup, shutdown, and scaling, enabling organizations to operate more efficiently, reduce human error, and focus on strategic initiatives. By implementing automation, businesses can ensure consistent performance, optimize resource utilization, and enhance overall productivity.

Benefits of Auto Start and Auto Shutdown Policies:

Auto Start and Auto Shutdown policies offer significant benefits in Azure VM management. Firstly, they enable organizations to optimize costs by automatically starting VMs only when needed, preventing unnecessary usage and expense. Conversely, auto shutdown ensures resources are not left running idle, reducing waste and lowering operational costs. Additionally, these policies enhance reliability and security by ensuring VMs are consistently available during business hours and safely powered off during non-operational times. Overall, Auto Start and Auto Shutdown policies play a pivotal role in maximizing efficiency, minimizing costs, and maintaining a well-orchestrated Azure environment.

Configuring Auto Start for Azure VMs:

Here are the detail steps to configure the auto-start VM in Azure:

• In Azure, First go to Automation Accounts resource and click on create a new resource.

• You have to give your automation account name, resource group and select the region and subscription in which your VM’s are placed and click on create.

• After the resource has been created go to it’s overview page and from there you can find different options in sidebar, look for Runbook, select it and then click on create a new runbook button.

• Give runbook a name, select python workflow as a runbook type. Select its available version and click on create button.

• Now in Automation Account page search for schedules in a sidebar and click on create a new schedule.

• On create a schedule page, you can give your schedule a name and the date in which you want to start schedule and modified it according to your needs.

• Now in runbooks, go to the runbook which you have just created. Click on edit btton at the top, so we can write our modified script in there.

• Write the following script, change the resource group name and vm name according to your environment. After test it and publish it by clicking on publish button.

• Now just click on schedule in runbook page and then click on add a schedule button. And select the schedule which you just had created.

• Now your auto-start runbook is done and it runs on assigned schedule you can check the results in jobs section. In the runbook sidebar to see the output of the runbook process and its done!

Implementing Auto Shutdown for Azure VMs:

• Log in to the Azure Portal  and navigate to the Virtual Machines blade.

• Choose the virtual machine for which you want to set up auto shutdown.

• In the virtual machine’s menu, select “Auto-shutdown” under the Operations section.

• In the Auto-shutdown blade, toggle the “Auto-shutdown” switch to enable the feature. Then, specify the desired shutdown time and time zone. Optionally, you can set a notification to alert users before shutdown.

• Once you’ve configured the auto shutdown settings according to your requirements. Click the “Save” button to apply the changes.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, By automate VM startup and shutdown processes of Azure VMs brings numerous benefits to organizations utilizing cloud infrastructure. By implementing Auto Start and Auto Shutdown policies, businesses can optimize resource utilization, reduce costs, enhance reliability, and improve overall operational efficiency. These policies streamline routine tasks, mitigate human error, and ensure that VMs are available when needed while minimizing waste during idle periods. Through the deployment of automation, organizations can focus their efforts on strategic initiatives rather than mundane maintenance tasks, ultimately driving innovation and competitiveness in the cloud era.

You can checkout our further blogs by going to this link: Blogs

HAPPY LEARNING !

The post Optimizing Azure Workloads: Automate VM Startup and Shutdown appeared first on Impulz Technologies LLC.

Azure DevOps Pipelines is a cloud service that you can use to automatically build, test and deploy your code to (m)any environments. Since Apr 2019 you can use new Azure DevOps tasks for Microsoft Dynamics 365 to upload and deploy your application deployable package to LCS environments. This blog describes how to create build and development server and set up Azure DevOps to build and deploy code for Microsoft Dynamics 365 to LCS environment.

1-Pre-Requisite:

• Before implementing this blog you must have to go through my previous blog How To Setup A Connection Between Azure DevOps & LCS. to successfully create build & development server.

2-Setup Agent Pool:

If you are an organization administrator, you create and manage agent pools from the agent pools tab in admin settings.

1. Sign in to your organization (https://dev.azure.com/{yourorganization}).
2. Choose Azure DevOps, Organization settings.
3. Click on “New agent pool…” button and give it a name.

3-Build Agent Setup

As part of the LCS deployment to a Microsoft-hosted environment, you can configure a Build Agent properties. As a part of the deployment process, you can configure your build agent name and the name of the agent pool that will be this agent owner. The agent pool must exist prior to deployment or the deployment will fail. By default, the “Default” agent pool is used, but here we are using our own agent pool.

• In your LCS environment, go to your Project and select cloud hosted environment setting from the top.
• Here you can select the Add button and after selecting the proper version choose the Dev/Test Environement Topology.
• After that choose the Build/Test environment and in advance setting choose the pool which you were created in past.

• When a Build VM is deployed in Developer topology through LCS, it is pre-configured and ready to start a build. You can change the default configuration at any time from the Visual Studio IDE or the Azure DevOps interface.

3.1-Setup Build Pipeline

• In your Azure DevOps Project Pipeline Section, Select your pipeline and click “Edit”. Default build pipeline will consist of many steps. I will just walk through the most important. As a first step, you give your pipeline a proper name and select the agent pool you created in the previous step.

• Then, you can map source code folders you want to include in the build and cloak the ones you want to exclude. Optionally select Clean options and whether you want to apply Label in your selected Azure repository branch. To distinguish between Labels, you can leverage various built-in variables or create your own. I will talk about variables later.

• These were the basic steps and now you can test your build pipeline. If needed, you can adjust build parameters and finally queue a new build.
• As a result of a successful build, build artifacts are published in your pipeline. Build artifacts are the files produced by your build, e.g. application deployable package. You can download artifacts produced by your build from an instance of the successfully completed build.

4-Developer Agent Setup

To deploy a cloud development environment in your Lifecycle Services (LCS) project:

• Create a connection between an LCS project and your Azure subscription. You’ll need your Azure subscription ID and authorize the use of the subscription.
• Select + under Environments to deploy.
• Select an application and platform version.
• Select an environment topology.
• If you chose a cloud-hosted environment, select which Azure connector you want to use.Then Select Develop Topology.
• Then on next page, simply click the done and your dev machine is deployed, it usually takes 5 to 6 hours approximately for the machine to be in deployed state.
• The user who requests the cloud environment is provisioned as the administrator in that environment.
• User accounts are provisioned on the development VM to allow access to the environment using Remote Desktop, these credentials are accessible on the environment page in LCS.

4.1-Visual Studio Solution and Project Setup

• Login to Azure DevOps then go to your Project > Repos.
• Click the 3 dots next to the Trunk folder to create 2 folders called ‘Dev’ and ‘Main’.
• Create 2 sub-folders called ‘Metadata’ and ‘Projects’ under each of the Dev and Main folders. Your folder structure should look like this:

• Login to your Dev environment.
• Launch File Explorer to create the following folder structure in your C drive.
• Launch Visual Studio in Admin mode.
• Create a new project.

• Type ‘Finance Operations’ in the search field then select Finance Operations and click next.
• Enter your project name, location, and solution name then set your location to “C:\VS\Projects\” folder. Leave the box ‘Place solution and project in the same directory’ unchecked and click create.

• From the main menu, click View > Team Explorer.
• Click the Home icon then Source Control Explorer.
• Click the plug icon at the top to connect your local environment with Azure DevOps Project.
• From the Source Control Explorer, open Workspaces.
• Click ‘add’ to create a workspace:<ComputerName>_Dev.
• Select the Dev workspace then click edit. Map your Source Control Folders to your Local Folders as follows. Click ok when done.

• Switch to your Dev workspace.
• Convert the Dev and Main Folders to Dev and Main Branches:Right click Dev > Branching and Merging > Convert to Branch.Right click Main > Branching and Merging > Convert to Branch.

• In this way, developers work in the Dev branch and when they successfully done their work we simply merge the code from Dev > Main Branch and apply the changes.
• Right-click the Main folder then select ‘Check In Pending Changes’. This will copy the files to the Main folder in DevOps Repos (Main Source Control).

5-Conclusion

• Now you simply have to commit the changes by going to the pending changes section in source control explorer and your code is successfully synced to the Azure DevOps Repo and triggered the build pipeline, In this way you can successfully create build and development server and connect Azure DevOps to automate your package deployment!

Thank you for your time to read this. In part 2, I will discuss how to deploy a build artifact to selected LCS environment.

HAPPY LEARNING!

The post Create Build & Development Server In D365 FO – Part 1 appeared first on Impulz Technologies LLC.

Microsoft has changed how the admin user is setup in Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain development virtual machine in order to access the Dynamics 365 development environment after the release of the VHD for version 10.0.24 in LCS. Prior to this version, user just needed to provide a valid domain email in Admin User Provisioning tool to access the Dynamics 365 development environment. But now, when you instantly try to execute the Admin User Provisioning Tool with the domain user, it will give the following error.

Now you need to run a script that will create self-signed certificates to be used on the virtual machine, and a customer-provided application registration ID for authentication. After successfully running the script, the environment will be ready for use.

Reason to introduce App registration

App Registrations enable custom-built or third-party applications to use Microsoft Entra ID security features. By using these features, organizations can ensure that their applications and resources are accessed securely and only by authorized users.

App Registrations can be used to grant permissions to users and groups, configure SSO, and define custom API permissions that the application can request. They also enable administrators to monitor and audit application usage, view application-specific logs, and set up alerts and notifications for suspicious activity.

By using previous approach if we run the AdminUserProvisioning tool we will encounter above error while configure VHD setup for D365 FO 10.0.24 version or later.

Steps to set up for new 10.0.24 version or later

There are some steps required before you can assign it to your Domain:

1. Go tohttps://portal.azure.com > Microsoft Entra ID > App Registration and register a new App

Note: Microsoft has renamed Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) to Microsoft Entra ID for the following reasons:

• • to communicate the multicloud, multiplatform functionality of the products,
  • to alleviate confusion with Windows Server Active Directory, and
  • to unify the Microsoft Entra product family.
  • Register a new application in Microsoft Entra ID

2. Provide the One-Box URL as reponse address eg: https://usnconeboxax1aos.cloud.onebox.dynamics.com/

3. Copy the AppID to your clipboard will use later

4. App Registration for Dynamics 365 FO 10.0.24 One-Box Environment completed.

5. Execute the “Generate Self-Signed Certificates” PowerShell script from the Desktop

6. Provide the AppID copied from the App Registration

7. Execute the Admin Provisioning Tool and provide your Domain account address

8. Open https://usnconeboxax1aos.cloud.onebox.dynamics.com/ in Edge and login

Thanks.

The post Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain: Access development environment appeared first on Impulz Technologies LLC.