This article is about testing VirtualBox on Azure VM, the open-ource virtualization platform of Oracle. For the official nested virtualization support in Microsoft Azure please use the Nested Virtualization feature. You can find more info at my post serries about Nested Virtualization here: https://www.e-apostolidis.gr/tag/nested-virtualization/

Virtualization has great interest and value to the information systems ecosystem. As a sence, Virtualization, refers to running two or more operating systems one one physical PC. Either the multiple operating systems run side-by-side, with a separate piece of software called a hypervisor used to manage them, or one operating system runs the other operating systems within program windows. The former is usually limited to servers, with the latter finding common use on desktop computers.

Microsoft Azure offers virtualization layer access at the following series Virtual Machines:

D_v3
Ds_v3
E_v3
Es_v3
F2s_v2
M 160

You can find out excactly the VM sizes that supports Virtualization at the official documentation: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/acu

Why VM virtualization on Azure?

Virtualization allows to run Old Applications, that need Operating Systems that are not officialy supported on Azure. If you have an old app that is preventing your jurney to Microsoft Azure then you can transfer your old machine that runs this application directly on Azure. Of cource you can use it for testing purposes!

Step by Step Guide

For my test I am using a Standard D2s v3 (2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory) Azure VM running Windows Server 2012 R2, as it is the most ligh Windows OS to run virtualization on Azure. You can also use Windows 10, WIndows Server 2016 & WIndows Server 2019.

Download the latest VirtualBox from the Official site, https://www.virtualbox.org/, currently 6.1

Install it with all default settings. Press yes at the Network Interfaces warning and proceed.

After the installation open the VirtualBox interface. You can add a previous created Virtual Machine from your on-premises VM, or you can create a New one.

For my test I downloaded a Windows Server 2003 Standard x86 image from my Visual Studio Subscription. Yes you can still download official Windows Server 2003 🙂

Create a new VirtualBox Virtual Machine, and select Microsoft Windows 2003 32-bit. I provided 4096 GB Ram, since it is 32-bit.

My VMs Hardware details:

Open the VM and at the “Optical Disk Selector” promt press Add and select the OS iso

And a tear droped… Windows Server 2003 setup screen, on a Virtual Machine on Azure… That runs Windows Server 2012 R2…

Networking

VirtualBox has already created a new Network Interface Card to use for the VirtualBox Virtual Machines.

You will see two IP configuration. The Ethernet adapter “Ehternet” shows the IP address of the Azure VM and the “VirtualBox Host-Only Network” shows the IP subnet that will be used for the nested VMs

Since we are inside an Azure Virtual Machine we need to use Network Address Translation to forward the traffic inside our VM. This will allow you to conenct directly to the VirtualBox VM directly from internet. This can be used for publishing a Web Service, Web Site, RDP or any other service that needs to be published from the VirtualBox nested VM.

To manage the Port Forwarding from the Host VM (Azure VM) to the Guest VM (VirtualBox VM) open the VirtualBox Preferences and go to Network

Add an Interface, add a Nertwork CIDR (the network subnet that you want the guest VMs to have) and press Port Forwarding

Now, close the VirtualBox preferences and open the VM settings and go to Network. At the Adapter 1 go select “NAT Network” and select the “NATNetwork”

After this close the VM’s settings and login to the VM. Check the IP configuration (for windows use the cms ipconfig) and you will see that the VM has been assigned an IP from the 172.16.1.0/24 range that we added at the VirtualBox NAT network. My VM has the 172.16.1.4 IP address. Note this.

Lets go back to the VirtualBox Preferences -> Network -> Edit the NatNetwork -> Port Forwarding and add a rule to forward the 443 port from the Host VM (Azure VM) to the Guest VM (VirtualBox VM).

in my example I use Prt Forward for HTTP, HTTPS & RDP. I forward HTTP & HTTPS directly but since the RDP port 3389 is already used by the Azure VM, I use 43389 Port from Azure VM to the 3389 port of the Guest VM.

Those are my rules:

There are three places that you need to open the spesified ports in order to allow the conenction to reach the VirtualBox VM. Below I will go trough the process of opening the HTTPS port 443. The same is for all other ports.

1. Azure Network Security Group (NSG)
2. Azure VM Windows Firewall
3. VirtualBox VM Windows Firewall

1. Go to the Azure Portal, find the Network Security Group that protects the Public IP of the Azure VM and add an inbound security rule to allow access from Any source, any port, to the IP address of the Azure VM that hosts the VirutalBox and destination port 443 (for the HTTPS Web Service)

2. At the Azure VM open the Windows Firewall and add an inbound rule to allow port 443 any to any.

3. At the VirtualBox VM open the Windows Firewall and add an exception for Port 443

To test the conenctivity I just added the Application server role at my VirtualBox VM. This will publish the default IIS web page

Once the web server is ready, from my laptop I try to access the web page, usign the Public IP address of the Azure VM using https using my browser

https://104.214.233.164/

The “Under Construction” default page of Windows Server 2003 IIS

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post VirtualBox on Azure VM for testing or run Old apps appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Recently MIcrosoft Azure anounched the preview feature “Shared Disk”. The Shared Disk can be attached at two Azure MVs at the same time. The purpose is to create SQL Server Failover Cluster Instances (FCI), Scale-out File Server (SoFS), File Server for General Use (IW workload), Remote Desktop Server User Profile Disk (RDS UPD) and  SAP ASCS/SCS. More or less we can have a failover cluster at Azure VMs like haveing an on-premises failover cluster with shared storage.

At this post I will demostrate step-by-step how to create a Failover Cluster in Azure with two Azure VMs and a Shared Disk.

Since this is a preview feature at the time I am wroting this post, we need to sign up for our preview.

Once we have the confiration that the Shared Disk preview is enabled at our Subscription, we can proceed and create our Shared Disk. Currently this can be done only by using an ARM Template, in order to define the “maxShares”: “[parameters(‘maxShares’)]” disk property. This property defines in how VMs can this Disk be attached.

Other limitations of the preview are:

• Currently only available with premium SSDs.
• Currently only supported in the West Central US region.
• All virtual machines sharing a disk must be deployed in the same proximity placement groups.
• Can only be enabled on data disks, not OS disks.
• Only basic disks can be used with some versions of Windows Server Failover Cluster, for details see
• Failover clustering hardware requirements and storage options.
• ReadOnly host caching is not available for premium SSDs with maxShares>1.
• Availability sets and virtual machine scale sets can only be used with FaultDomainCount set to 1.
• Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery support is not yet available.

From the Azure Portal search and open the “Template Deployment”

\

Select the “Build your own template in the editor”

And paste the Shared Disk Json at the template

The Shared Disk Json:

{ 
  "$schema": "https://schema.management.azure.com/schemas/2015-01-01/deploymentTemplate.json#",
  "contentVersion": "1.0.0.0",
  "parameters": {
    "dataDiskName": {
      "type": "string",
      "defaultValue": "mySharedDisk"
    },
    "dataDiskSizeGB": {
      "type": "int",
      "defaultValue": 1024
    },
    "maxShares": {
      "type": "int",
      "defaultValue": 2
    }
  },
  "resources": [
    {
      "type": "Microsoft.Compute/disks",
      "name": "[parameters('dataDiskName')]",
      "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
      "apiVersion": "2019-07-01",
      "sku": {
        "name": "Premium_LRS"
      },
      "properties": {
        "creationData": {
          "createOption": "Empty"
        },
        "diskSizeGB": "[parameters('dataDiskSizeGB')]",
        "maxShares": "[parameters('maxShares')]"
      }
    }
  ] 
}

After the Template Deployment is comleted you will see a normal disk at the Resoruce Group.

Create the VMs

Create both VMs like any normal Azure VM creation. I created wto Windows Server 2016 VMs. Both VMs must be added to the same availability set (Fault Domain = 1), in order to add them behing an internal load balancer and they must be added to the same Proximity Placement Group.

To create a Proximity Placement Group, just create a new resource, search for “Proximity Placement Group” and press create. Just provide a name for the PPG and the location, that must be the same as the Disk.

And select it at the VM creation wizard:

Attach the Sahred Disk to Both VMs

When attaching the Shared Disk to the VMs you will see the “disk shares used” This reports in how many VMs this disk is attached.

Once the VMs are ready we can start the Failover Cluster process. We need to add both VMs to the Domain. Then go tot he Disk Management and bring the disks online, GTP on both servers. The next step is to enable the Failover Clustering feature on both VMs. This can be easily acomplished using the below command:

Install-WindowsFeature -Name Failover-Clustering –IncludeManagementTools –ComputerName SDVM01
Install-WindowsFeature -Name Failover-Clustering –IncludeManagementTools –ComputerName SDVM02

Restart both VMs

Lets start the Failover Cluster Wizard. Select both Azure VMs and validate with running all tests.

The report should have sucess to all Storage Related Stuff. Only the Cluster IP will fail, since it cannot allocate an Azure IP.

So we will not create the Cluster uning the GUI wizard. We will create the cluster unsing the new-cluster command to spesify the cluter IP. But first lets create the Cluster IP Load Balancer.

To enable the Cluster IP we need to create an Internal StandardLoad Balancer with Static IP. Add both VMs to the Backend pool of the load balancer.

And Run this command to one of the two VMs:

New-Cluster -Name cluster1 -Node SDVM01,SDVM02  -StaticAddress 192.168.0.10

The cluster is ready and we can now we can add the Disk to the Cluster

righ click at the Cluster Disk 1 and select “Add to cluster shared volumes”

Wait untill the disk is online

‘

and check the C:\ClusterStorage path for the “Volume1” link.

open the Volume1 and create a file, just to cehck that it is working

To have a more stable cluster, add a Quorum. At the cluster name, right click and select More Actions / Configure Quorum settings.

Since we are on Azure we will configure an Azure Storage account for quorum. Select the “Advanced Configuration”

and select the “Configure CLoud Witness”.

Create an Azure Storage Account

add the Storage Account to the Virtual Network of the VMs, to secure it

And once the Storage Account is ready, copy/paste the name and the Key to the Culster Quorum wizard.

Now we have a full failover cluster

Server 1:

Server 2:

Now we can deploy SQL Server FCI, File Server, etc.. !!!!

More info abuot the Shared Disk: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/disks-shared-enable

Pantelis Apostolidis

Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.

www.cloudcorner.gr

The post Azure Failover Cluster with Shared Disk – Step by Step appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.