If you require a way to download your Azure Virtual Machine to either your on premise VMware or Hyper-V environment, perhaps because the cost of running that Azure VM is too high, or even for some compliance reason this blog will show you how to quickly download your Azure VM easily with Carbon. No need to download your Azure VM via powershell, or even downloading the VHD from the Azure portal. Carbon will download and convert your Azure VM to your hypervisor of choice with just a few clicks.

Azure storage has provided companies with a way to store almost limitless amount of data. But just like kids in a candy store this can get out of hand, and expensive. Being able to store as much data as you want is great, however it is something that can grow to a point where you are spending more on storage than you actually need.

Recently we had one of our clients inform us that he used Cloud Storage Manager to find which were the largest Blobs in his Azure Storage Containers. Here is a quick run down to show one of the many reports on your Azure Blob consumption that you can run with Cloud Storage Manager.

We were recently asked for help by one of our clients that needed to separate a number of users from their existing domain by moving them into their own Active Directory forest. This can happen for all sorts of reasons, including divestments, security, geographical or division separation. Whatever the reason, they needed to move these users across into an entirely new AD domain.

Do you need to integrate a new company in with your existing employer and therefore in to your already provisioned Azure AD tenant. Or perhaps just need to share your tenancy and office 365 services with more than one company, then you could find yourself in a position where you need to sync users from another domain and have already configured AD Connect, well there is a way to add the second domain to your current Azure tenancy, so you can sync those users from the second domain.

Something we get asked quite often is, how can I see the size of my Containers in each Storage Account? We know that Azure storage is one of the fastest growing aspects of Azure because it offers almost a limitless supply of storage, so companies are consuming more and more storage at an explosive rate. The question of being able to track this consumption is becoming more and more relevant. OK, so how can I get the size of my containers in a Storage Account?

As Microsoft is forever releasing new functionality within Azure and all its offerings its often hard to keep abreast of the latest changes in technology. To do so, we here at SmiKar Software often follow influential and knowledgeable people that are experts in the their fields, to keep up to date ourselves. In no particular order, here are some of the noteworthy Azure Blogs that we follow.