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.

At the 15# Azurehads meetup we talked about how to integrate our data using Azure Data Factory and from the Azure Data Factory to call an Azure HDInsights cluster that will be created on-demand. After the process ends, the HDInsights cluster will be automatically deleted.

Also we saw how we can copy and transform data from almost any source to almost any location.

Download the presentation: http://bit.ly/AH15Presentation

Download the demo video: http://bit.ly/AH15Video

Download the project files: http://bit.ly/AH15Projectfiles

At the demo, we created a data factory. At the data factory we created a pipeline that reads a Python script from an Azure Storage account folder. THe Azure Data FActory creates an on-demand HDInsights Spark cluster and runs the python script. The python script reads a text and provides for output a text with the word count of the input text. Finally the cluster is automatically deleted.

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 Azureheads #15 | Integrate your data to the cloud meetup resources appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Now we can restore an Azure VM directly with managed disks with a truly single-click operation.

In addition, we can restore only the unmanaged disks to a storage account and the process will create a template for us to create the VM  on a later time.

So, at the recovery services vault, select a VM to restore and you will see two main options.

Create New: to create a new Virtual Machine with managed disks or to restore the disks with the ARM Template

Replace existing: To restore the VM in-place, replacing the current VM.

At both options you will need to select a Staging storage account, in order to restore the VHD files. Those file will be auto-converted to managed disks by the process.

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 New Azure VM Restore Experience appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Azure Storage Advanced Threat Protection is a new security feature, currently in Preview. It monitors the Azure Blob Storage accounts. It detects anomalies and uncommon access to the Storage Account and notifies the admins through email.

All the Azure Storage Advanced Threat Protection monitoring and logs are integrated to the Azure Security Center, including the well known ASC recommendations.

It’s so easy to enable, just go to the Azure Portal, navigate to your storage account’s Advanced Threat Protection setting and switch it ON!

After that you can view the alerts at the Security Center, under Threat Protection’s Security Alerts.

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 Storage Advanced Thread Protection appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Το Microsoft Azure ανακοίνωσε την δυνατότητα να φιλοξενεί στατικές ιστοσελίδες απευθείας στο Blob Storage, με το κόστος του Blob Storage! Τι σημαίνει αυτό? Για 1 GB χώρο και 100000 views το κόστος είναι περίπου 0,05 ευρώ το μήνα!

Στις στατικές ιστοσελίδες μπορούμε επίσης εκτός από στατικό περιεχόμενο να έχουμε και CLient Side Scripting οπως JavaScript αλλά όχι Server Side Scripting. Επίσης μπορούμε να δώσουμε και μια Custom σελίδα που θα γυρίζει αντί για 404.

Μπορείτε να υπολογίσετε το κόστος με το Azure Prising Calculator Στο link https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Τι χρειαζόμαστε? απλά ένα Storage Account V2.

Μόλις δημιουργηθεί το Storage Account, πρώτα ενεργοποιούμε το Static website από τα Settings του Storage Account. Μόλις πατήσουμε Save θα δημιουργηθεί ένα Virtual Directory με το όνομα $web. Το πατάμε για να μπούμε μέσα στο Blob για να ανεβάσουμε το περιεχόμενο μας. Επίσης σημειώνουμε το Primary endpoint γιατί είναι και το URL του Site μας.

Για να ανεβάσουμε content στο $web Blob μπορούμε να χρησιμοποιήσουμε τον Storage Explorer

και είμαστε έτοιμοι. Κάνουμε Browse στο URL του Static website, στο παρδειγμά μου είναι το https://proximagr.z6.web.core.windows.net/

Φυσικά μπορούμε να βάλουμε το δικό μας Domain. Πρώτα φτιάχνουμε ένα CNAME που θα κάνει Point στο Endpoint και μετά πηγαίνουμε στο Custom Domain όπου δίνουμε το CNAME μας.

και το αποτέλεσμα:

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 Storage | Static Web Site appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

Remember all that red alerts when comes to deleting blobs? Ah, forget them! Microsoft Azure brought the Windows Recycle Bin to Azure and named it Soft delete.

The soft delete feature basically is similar to the Windows recycle bin. Deleting a file from the Windows explorer, the Operating System instead of actually removing the file it moves it to the recycle bin. The file stays there and it can be undeleted at any time. The soft delete feature in Microsoft Azure does the same thing for blob storage. When data is deleted or overwritten, the data is not actually gone. Instead, the data is soft deleted, thereby making it recoverable if necessary.

It’s not enabled by default, but it’s very easy to enable it. Go to the Storage Account, scroll down to the Blob Service and select “Soft delete”. Select the Retention policy and Save, that’s all!

Let’s delete and test. Browse a container and click the “Show delete blobs”. The current blob will show as active.

deleting the blob it will change the status to “deleted”

Click the three little dots and you can undelete, the blob, in Azure!!!

Active again!

Be careful, if you delete the whole container, the storage account or the Azure Subscription there is no return. The Soft delete feature is at blob level inside a container.

For more deltails visit the docs: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-soft-delete

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 Blob Storage… Recycle Bin!!!!!!! appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

As we have already saw at a previews post, we can use the Service Endpoints to protect an Azure SQL Server inside an Azure Virtual Network. Today we will see how we can protect a Storage Account.

First we need to enable the Microsoft.Storage Service Endpoint to an existing Virtual Network or create a new Virtual Network and enable it. At this port I am creating a new Virtual Network, so at the Azure Portal press New and at the search box type “Virtual Network”.

Enter the name of the Virtual Network and all the required fields. The only difference is to click “Enable” at the Service Endpoints and select the “Microsoft.Storage”.

After the Virtual Network we can proceed with the Storage Account. Create a Storage Account by going to Azure Portal, press New, search for “Storage Account” and press Create. At the “Create storage account” blade enter all the required fields. The difference here is to click “Enable” at the “Virtual Networks” and select the Virtual Network that you have enabled “Service Endpoints” and select the desired subnet.

After the Storage Account creation, open the Storage Account and go to the “Firewall and virtual network” setting. and you will see that the selected Virtual Network and Subnet are configured and all other networks and the Internet access are forbidden.

Now if you go to the File Service of the Storage Account you will get an “Access Denied” message, since you are accessing from the Internet.

In order to access the Storage Account File Service (And all other services like blob) I created a Virtual Machine inside the Virtual Network and opened the Portal from it. Now I can access the Storage Account services.

Of course we can add our Public IP and access the Storage Account configuration, make the required changes and then remove it.

Also we can add / remove existing and new networks

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 Use Service Endpoints to protect an Azure Storage Account inside an Azure Azure Virtual Network appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.

A new feature is in public preview, the Azure Backup Reports. Now we can have the Azure Backup Reports at the OMS Workspace, Event Hub and Power Bi. You can use Power BI to view report dashboard, download reports and create custom reports

The configuration has two steps, one to configure the Azure Backup Reports connection with each service and the other is to get the data at each service.

First go to a Recovery Services vault and select Backup Reports. Next press the Configure button.

The Diagnostic settings blade will open. Change the Status to “On” and select the desired services to collect the Azure Backup Logs.

For the Power Bi integration we need a Storage account. So check the “Archive to storage account” option and select a storage account. The storage account must be at the same region as the Azure Backup account.

To integrate with OMS check the “Send to Log Analytics” option and select an OMS Workspace.

An other option is to stream the Azure Backup logs to event hub. To configure it check the “Stream to an event hub” and select the event hub namespace and policy name.

At the bottom part of the configuration blade select the Logs that you want to get. The retention days option is only for the Storage Account configuration.

Press save and return to the Backup reports blade. Now press the “Sign in” to connect to Power Bi to configure the Service.

At the lower left corner of the Power Bi Portal press “Get Data”

At the AppSource press the “Get” button under the Services.

Search and select the “Azure Backup”

At the connect to Azure Backup page enter the Storage Account name. This is the storage account that we selected at the Azure Backup Reports configuration.

Press next and Save. Now the Azure Backup workspace is ready. Be patient, it needs time to start reporting data.

If you go back to the Azure Portal, the Backup Reports blade has changed and it only has the option to connect to your Power Bi dashboard.

If you browse to your Power Bi dashboard, you can view the Azure Backup Reports Workspace as the below image.

For the OMS integration, you only need to go to the Log Search and query “Category=”AzureBackupReport” and you will have all the Azure Backup Report logs. Following the OMS logic you can create a custom View, you can follow this post: Azure Log Analytics

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 Backup Reports appeared first on Apostolidis Cloud Corner.