Azure – SMBtotheCloud

Auto Rotate Background & Lock Screen Images with AZ Automation + Graph API

Gannon Novak | January 23, 2025 | Azure, Intune

There’s no shortage of posts regarding updating the background and lock screen images for your endpoints. The question that usually comes up is how to do this on Windows 10/11 Pro. This is because the Intune device restriction policy makes adding background/lock screen images easy, but it’s only compatible with Windows Enterprise/Edu SKUs. If that […]

Auto Rotate Background & Lock Screen Images with AZ Automation + Graph API Read More »

Exceeding the normal churn rate limit for Azure Site Resovery? How to Migrate to a Premium Cache Storage Accounts

Gannon Novak | December 31, 2024 | Azure

If you’re reading this, you probably know what Azure Site Recovery is (ASR). At a high level, ASR is a disaster recovery solution that replicates workloads on your Azure VMs or Physical on-prem servers to a secondary Azure Region. This allows you to failover your production workloads to the secondary region with minimal downtime. Configuring

Exceeding the normal churn rate limit for Azure Site Resovery? How to Migrate to a Premium Cache Storage Accounts Read More »

AVD Host Time Zone Randomly Changing

Gannon Novak | December 18, 2024 | Azure, Windows

I recently had an issue with an AVD client, where the time zone on AVD hosts randomly changed to the US Central time zone, even though the Time Zone was configured to MST with Intune. Adding a scheduled task to set the time zone at user login still didn’t completely resolve the issue. Users still

AVD Host Time Zone Randomly Changing Read More »

Using Azure VMs for Autopilot Testing

Gannon Novak | December 5, 2024 | Azure, Intune, Windows

I recently inherited an existing Hybrid-Join Intune tenant and had a unique situation where I needed to use Azure to test Autopilot. Since this was a new client and an environment I was not familiar with, I needed to put my disdain for hybrid-join aside and help determine if Hybrid-Join Autopilot was still functioning. Yes,

Using Azure VMs for Autopilot Testing Read More »

Removing Orphaned Local User Profiles in Pooled AVD Environments

Gannon Novak | September 11, 2024 | Azure, Windows

The most common AVD setup is a pooled configuration with FSLogix. This means that you have two or more session hosts and a group of many users who connect to those hosts. FSLogix handles the user profiles, so it doesn’t matter which session host the user connects to. Their profile is mounted to whichever host

Removing Orphaned Local User Profiles in Pooled AVD Environments Read More »

Resolving a new AVD Session Host Missing from the Host Pool

Gannon Novak | August 29, 2024 | Azure, Windows

I recently had an issue with a customer who was trying to add additional AVD hosts to their host pool. The host deployments were showing as successful in Azure (like the screenshot below), properly joined to the domain, healthy, and running in Azure.  The issue is that these hosts were not part of the host

Resolving a new AVD Session Host Missing from the Host Pool Read More »

Moving from Classic to New Teams on AVD and a script to automate it

Gannon Novak | June 26, 2024 | Azure, Teams

Intro If an organization is using AVD, there’s a very high likelihood they’re also using Teams. As most of you probably know, Teams went through a transformation around a year ago where a new Teams client was built and became GA. The original Teams application became known as “Classic Teams” and the newly build Teams

Moving from Classic to New Teams on AVD and a script to automate it Read More »

Windows Activation in Azure with Azure Firewall

Gannon Novak | May 23, 2024 | Azure, Windows

If you configure an Azure environment with strict networking rules, like no or limited internet access, you may experience issues with Windows Activation on your VMs. This also extends to Win10/11 Pro & Ent for AVD and Windows 365 cloud PCs (if using vnet integration). Some of the screenshots below are what you may see

Windows Activation in Azure with Azure Firewall Read More »