by ezs | May 14, 2026 | evilzenscientist
The new v6 and v7 family Azure hardware is now broadly available, with plenty of capacity in the various regions.
The biggest changes are to network and storage drivers, moving to use the Microsoft MANA interface for network fabric, and a switch from SCSI to NVMe for disk.
Unlike previous SKU updates, e.g. v3 to v5, this family update requires some planning, especially on the Linux side.
There is a great PowerShell script to assist with the switch, which automates much of the roll forward, and provides a roll back as well.
In testing I found that two additional checks made this work flawlessly:
- Ensure the latest Azure VM tools are are installed (azure-vm-utils)
- Ensure the nvme drivers are installed (modprobe, dracut.conf)
Usual disclaimers before doing this – ensure you have a backup of your Linux VM before this work, you could be left with a somewhat broken VM. The rollback script works well.
by ezs | Apr 4, 2025 | evilzenscientist
Note for the future.
- Deletion performs a soft delete, which leaves the Log Management solution in place, which then can’t be deleted
- Make sure you do a hard delete, which allows the Log Management solution to be deleted.
I wish I remembered this every time.
by ezs | Aug 29, 2024 | evilzenscientist
Today was the end of my experiment with MySQL PaaS in Azure.
To be honest – performance, metrics and security were as described. Private connectivity within the virtual network, horizontal and vertical scaling, great metrics.
I got burned twice.
Once with a “potential bug” that burned $65k of Azure spend in a few hours (that was eventually refunded!), more recently with the Azure portal throwing errors continually.
I’ve exported the data, reimported to an IaaS MySQL/MariaDB instance – and moved on.
by ezs | Jul 1, 2023 | evilzenscientist
As we keep seeing – Azure tag names are not case-sensitive, until they are.
Per the documentation https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-resource-manager/management/tag-resources
Tag names are case-insensitive for operations. A tag with a tag name, regardless of the casing, is updated or retrieved. However, the resource provider might keep the casing you provide for the tag name. You’ll see that casing in cost reports.
Tag values are case-sensitive.
Per the now four year old bug, Azure Resource Manager itself should respect this (i.e. case insensitive and case preserving) https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/issues/9271
Then we get issues with:
CostCenter, Costcenter, costcenter – all being different depending on the tooling in use.
by ezs | Apr 24, 2023 | evilzenscientist
Four re-certifications in the last few days.
I really like the Microsoft model – free to re-certify, keep up to date on the latest areas of technology.
AZ-104, AZ-700, AZ-400, AZ-500 all current again.
If you’re about to re-sit these my top tips: read the exam subject matter, see what changed since you took the last test. Microsoft Learn has training, documentation and guidance – https://learn.microsoft.com – and you can also revisit learning resources such as John Savills Technical Training.
Open book test, 45 minutes. Bing is your friend.
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