JSS on Windows Azure VM

[Araneta]

Hi Everyone,

Just wondering if anyone had deployed JSS on a Windows Azure VM? We are slowly moving our data centre to the cloud and just want to gather your expertise on this?
Issues you encountered? Gotchas? etc..

Thanks in advance.

[davidacland · Accepted solution]

Not quite the same but we have a number of JSSes hosted remotely. The only two main considerations that come to mind are firewall ports, as you'd have to be a bit more careful about what you open up, and bandwidth consumption.

Make sure you don't use a JDS with a cloud JSS, as uploading a package goes via the MySQL DB so can get pretty expensive!

[davidacland · Accepted solution]

Not quite the same but we have a number of JSSes hosted remotely. The only two main considerations that come to mind are firewall ports, as you'd have to be a bit more careful about what you open up, and bandwidth consumption.

Make sure you don't use a JDS with a cloud JSS, as uploading a package goes via the MySQL DB so can get pretty expensive!

[lucas_henneman · Accepted solution]

Hi Araneta,

I recently did a test run with Azure's free trial and the JSS ran fine. Like davidacland supposed, my only hangup was changing the firewall to allow internet traffic. To do so, I configured an Azure Endpoint for my desired port. It was simple after I figured out what I needed to do.

Overall, I liked Azure. Its web interface was clean and simple. It has VPNs and IPsec tunnels, resource isolation, and SAML 2.0, among other security features. Regarding virtual machines, Azure can auto-scale, and it had all of the operating systems I needed/wanted (namely Ubuntu, Windows Server, and CentOS). I don't think it has a DNS like Amazon Web Services, unfortunately.

Some features that looked interesting that I did not try were the Azure command line tool, Azure Resource Manager Templates (specify what cloud stuff you want in a JSON file and Azure sets it all up accordingly), Powershell-style runbooks for automation, a RESTful API, Azure Files for a distribution point, and Active Directory.

[Araneta]

Thanks @lucas.henneman and @davidacland . I might need to sign up again and try to see what the costs maybe to mimic an actual production JSS. You're not charged with ingress traffic right? Only egress? But then again there is MySQL DB. I might just install it manually inside the vm as well and see how it goes.

Thanks a lot guys.

[Araneta]

Hi @lucas.henneman, @davidacland, How did you guys setup your distribution point in Azure? I did put JSS on a Win 2012 R2 vm? I have an smb share setup and enabled http download. Casper admin can connect to my JSS in azure but can't mount the share.

Did you guys setup a point to site or site to site connection on the vnet?

[davidacland]

We normally use local (LAN) DPs with either SMB or AFP. Azure could certainly do it though. Can you manually connect to the SMB share in the Finder?

[Araneta]

Tried local DP and worked just fine. I might look into cloud DP but Jamf hasn't had support for Azure on that regard. :)

[guidotti]

Good morning, all.
I'm sorry to resurrect this old thread.

We are looking at putting a JSS in our test environment.
The other side of the house is implementing SCCM in Azure.
Now, almost two years later, is there anyone out there who has a bit of experience that could help me avoid any roadblocks or problems you ran into when you implemented this? We also have ExpressRoute, so it would be nice to have the JSS hosted in Azure, and the distribution point in Azure, also.

Thanks in advance for any sage advice.

[swapple]

Could Azure be an http distro point???