In the previous article, we have covered the basics of Microsoft Windows Server Core installation. After configuring the operating system and specifying the networks and storage for the future configuration, there are few more things left.

On 28th of September, Microsoft has released the Virtual Network peering, in GA. This new functionality gives you the opportunity to connect 2 Virtual Network in Azure between them, by using the network of the Azure Datacenter. Bye bye VPN S2S between virtual network 🙂

Software Defined Networking (SDN) in Windows Server 2016 provides a method to centrally configure and manage physical and virtual network devices such as routers, switches, load balancers and gateways in your datacenter. Virtual network elements such as Hyper-V Virtual Switch, Hyper-V Network Virtualization, and RAS Gateway are designed to be integral elements of your SDN infrastructure. Please note that you must install Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition for Hyper-V hosts and virtual machines (VMs) that run SDN infrastructure servers, such as Network Controller and Software Load Balancing nodes. However, you can run Windows Server 2016 Standard edition for Hyper-V hosts that contain only tenant workload virtual machines that are connected to SDN-controlled networks.

Extend Active Directory to Microsoft Azure is a common scenario when you implement hybrid cloud. For example, protected VM with Azure Site Recovery may need access to Active Directory even if On-Premise datacenter is unreachable. You can also extend your Active Directory to Azure when you use production workloads in Azure VMs to avoid to implement a new forest or to avoid to use the VPN connection for all Active Directory workloads. In this topic, we will see how to extend the Active Directory to Microsoft Azure.