Did you know that you can use Azure for free for learning purposes? And when I say free, i am not talking about the free account where you need to add your credit card and have 170€ credit. I am talking about a completely free environment to learn the Azure services and resources, but only for Learning purposes.

The Azure Sandbox is offered by the Microsoft Learn platform. Microsoft Learn is a completely free, online training platform that provides interactive learning for Microsoft products and more.

The Microsoft Learn sandbox (sometimes called the Azure sandbox) is a free environment that you can use to explore Azure through Microsoft Learn content.

And the magic here is that you don’t need an Azure account to use a sandbox! All you need is a Microsoft account to sign in with. If you don’t have one, you can create one for free.

Take a look at this. This is the Microsoft Learn home page where you can select whatever learning path or module you want to follow.

When you start a module that needs Microsoft Azure Access, there is an “Activate sandbox” button

When you press is, the only thing that you will be asked is to enter a mobile phone number, just for verification. It will not ask for credit card!

Once you verify your number, it will ask you to Review and accept the permissions to use Microsoft Azure using your Microsoft Account

And the Sandbox environment is ready! You can have 10 Sandboxes per day, for 2 hours each.

You can use Bash, PowerShell and the Azure Poral at will:

Bash:

PowerShell:

Azure Portal:

You can use the Sandbox to complete the specific exercise, but you can also play around with the resources. You can see at the below screenshot, that except the two “webVM”s of the exercise, I have created a “test” VM directly from the portal.

Start your learning path at Microsoft Learn NOW!

And remember: The sandbox may only be used to complete training on Microsoft Learn.

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

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Today I was trying to troubleshoot an Azure VM. This VM is behind a Network Virtual Appliance (NVA) and at the subnet it has User Defined Routes (UDR) that routes the traffic to the NVA. We was troubleshooting the NVA and it was not possible to connect with RDP to the VM.

Serial Console

This is an excellent scenario to use the Serial Console. From the Azure Portal, portal.azure.com, navigate to the Azure VMs blade, scroll down to the Support + Troubleshooting section and select “Serial Console”

The Serial Console will initialise and after a while it will establish the connection and the prompt will be the SAC>. If you encounter any errors establishing the SAC link, please follow this link: https://aka.ms/serialconsolewindows

At the SAC> prompt press help to list the available commands.

Using the i command we can get the IP Address configuration of the VM

Command Prompt

To create a command prompt session, first enter “cmd”. This will create a session.

To list the cmd sessions press “ch”

to select & login to a cmd session press “ch -si #” where # is the channel number. At the below screen press Enter

At the next screen enter the admin credentials

and we have Command Prompt. At this command prompt we can use all cmd commands.

Some examples:

ping -t

dir

enable telnet client:

dism /online /Enable-Feature /FeatureName:TelnetClient

PowerShell

at the command prompt enter “PowerShell” and press Enter to open a PowerShell Session

PowerShell example, disable windows firewall:

Set-NetFirewallProfile -Profile Domain,Public,Private -Enabled False

and yes, its off

of course, for the firewall we could disable it using CMD

netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off

PowerShell for conenction test: Test-NetConnection -Computername “hostname,IP,URL” -Port “portNumber”

For more example commands follow this link: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/troubleshooting/serial-console-cmd-ps-commands

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure VM CMD & PowerShell from the Portal appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Once you enable the Preview the new left sidebar will appear with all the sorting and filtering options. A very improved user experience.

Check all the Octomber Azure Portal Updates at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/azure-portal-october-update/

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Have you tried the improved filtering and sorting Azure Portal Experience? appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.