We are migrating from an on-premises virtual machine to Azure cloud. The virtual machine will eventually be decommissioned and we have many files and folders that we don't want to lose, like old websites and databases, scripts, programs etc.
We use an Azure storage account for storing and retrieving images via blob containers for the live websites.
Q: What is the best and most cost effective way to backup large amount of files unused in production, rarely accessed, from an on-premises virtual machine to Azure cloud?
Changing the Access tier to Azure Archive Storage(if storing data in Blobs) would be your best option. A few notes:
The Archive storage tier is only available at the blob level and not at the storage account level.
Archive storage is offline and offers the lowest storage costs but also the highest access costs
Hot, Cool, and Archive tiers can be set at the object level.
Additional info can be found here:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-blob-storage-tiers
recommendation would be to move those unused files to Azure storage archives, which is cost effective and easily accessible when required.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/archive/
Related
Could someone please tell some examples where we can use Azure file share in azure instead of Azure Blobs. In the internet whenever I search I get it can be mounted or it follows SMB protocol. But still I am not understanding a single case where we can use Azure File share.
For this I tried to look into When to use Azure blob storage versus Azure file share?
-This is a similar question but doesn't answer my question.
Azure provides a variety of storage tools and services, including Azure Storage. To determine which Azure technology is best suited for your scenario, see Review your storage options in the Azure Cloud Adoption Framework.
For detailed information and examples refer to this article: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-introduction
It depends mostly on your use-case and how you plan to access the data. If you simply want to mount and access your files Azure Files will be your best fit. If you are looking for the lowest cost and want to access your data programmatically through your application Azure Blob would be a better fit. Both are accessible through the portal or Azure Storage Explorer.
I also recommend this Learn module which covers the difference in data types and solutions.
Additional information: Azure Blob Storage vs Azure File Storage
Cost details of Azure Blob Storage pricing & Azure Files pricing
In short: if you ...
have an application that needs to store or access files in the cloud, use Blob Storage
need a file share that can be used by, for instance, a server, use File Shares
Azure Files shares can be mounted concurrently by cloud or on-premises deployments of Windows, Linux, and macOS. Azure Files shares can also be cached on Windows Servers with Azure File Sync for fast access near where the data is being used.
This means a File Share is, somewhat simplified, similar to a network share you would have in a local environment.
Azure Blob Storage helps you create data lakes for your analytics needs, and provides storage to build powerful cloud-native and mobile apps. Optimize costs with tiered storage for your long-term data, and flexibly scale up for high-performance computing and machine learning workloads.
This means Blob Storage is what you need when you're building powerful cloud-native and mobile apps.
My application till this day was working with local zip files,
meaning I was using a direct return new FileStream()
in the application and the local zip file that was located on the SDD/Network drive path (zip files can be hundreds of GB).
I configured the application to work with Azure Blob Storage, meaning each FileStream that was returned in now return as the Azure Blob SDK method:
GetBlobStreamAsync(ContainerName, BlobName).ConfigureAwait(false).GetAwaiter().GetResult()
I uploaded some zip files to a container in the blob storage and set the connection string in the application to work with that storage account.
The application was deployed and running on a virtual windows machine located in the same region of the Azure Storage Blob.
Note: This is a private cloud network.
When the app is streaming the zip file on Azure blob storage it seems that the performance has decreased by at least 8-9 times (problematic with hundreds of GB).
Speed comparison is between local C: drive on the same windows virtual machine that the application is running on an Azure Storage account which is located in the same region.
Note: NW Bandwidth - is 50 GB on the VM on azure
Solutions that I tried:
Azure blob Premium Performance storage - Didn’t improve performance
.Net Core - advantage of performance enhancements (we work with .Net framework so this is irrelevant).
Network File System (NFS) 3.0 performance considerations in Azure Blob storage - (Does not work with private cloud).
Hot, Cool, and Archive access tiers for blob data - The default is Hot so we already tried this scenario with no improvements.
Solutions I want to try:
Azure Files Share Storage as a cache solution
.Net Framework configuration - lists several quick configuration settings that you can use to make significant performance improvements
Question:
Does anyone have any suggestions on how can I optimize the streaming in front of the Azure Storage Blob?
Azure Files (share) or Storage Blob services are likely not the right services to be utilized for this scenario. There are two possible paths:
Break a single file into multiple files and leverage Storage Blob service that handles throughput better than Azure Files. Azure Files performs better with small(er) files which are typical to user documents (PDFs, Word, Excel, etc.)
Switch over to a more dedicated service that is designed specifically for large-size data transfer if breaking up a single file into multiple blobs is not an option.
The recommendation for each option will highly depend on the implementation details, requirements and constraints of the system.
I need to copy containers in Blob Storage across regions and wanted a solution that would do it without having to download locally and then upload it again. For example, I am trying to copy a container from East US to a container in SouthEast Asia. I used AzCopy to do that and the throughput I got was 22 Mb/s at best. I am not doing /SyncCopy either so is this best throughput the tool provides cross region ? Do we any other external tools that provide faster results ? Thanks.
Azcopy is your best bet when it comes to rapid data move within Azure. You could also consider using Azure Import/Export service if you have an urgent timeline for large amount of data transfer:
using Azure Import/Export service to securely transfer large amounts of data to Azure Blob storage and Azure Files by shipping disk drives to an Azure data center. This service can also be used to transfer data from Azure storage to hard disk drives and ship to your on-premise sites. Data from a single internal SATA disk drive can be imported either to Azure Blob storage or Azure Files.
There are also some external tools:
https://www.signiant.com/signiant-flight-for-fast-large-file-transfers-to-azure-blob-storage/
and:
http://asperasoft.com/fast-file-transfer-with-aspera-sod-azure/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-import-export-service
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/common/storage-moving-data
We are using Azure Virtual machines to host our application in the cloud.
Couple of virtual machines are hosting web front-end(state-less) and one virtual machine is hosting SQL Server (data is stored in Data Disk).
As we all know, these virtual machines consist of OS Disk and Data Disk(optional) which uses VHD files stored in blob storage. We are using geo-redundant blob storage which stores these VHD files.
We are now planning for disaster recovery for our cloud application. So if a Microsoft data center is down, is it possible to spin up virtual machines in another data center with the help of OS Disk and Data Disk stored in geo-replicated storage?
You are not supposed to use geo-replicated storage with SQL Server data disks. This is documented at https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn133149.aspx. Specifically, the document states "When creating a storage account, disable geo-replication as consistent write order across multiple disks is not guaranteed. Instead, consider configuring a SQL Server disaster recovery technology between two Azure data centers".
Currently you can not control if/when Microsoft fails over to the secondary (geo-replicated) storage account. Microsoft controls that.
As I understand it, in the event that Microsoft does declare a disaster and fails over, then your VMs would still work. Perhaps you'd have to create the VM again from the VHD, but the data would be there (minus anything lost since the last sync to storage).
How would I write to a tmp/temp directory in windows azure website? I can write to a blob, but i'm using an NPM that requires me to give it file names so that it can directly write to those filenames.
Are you using Cloud Services (PaaS) or Virtual Machines (IaaS).
If PaaS, look at Windows Azure Local Storage. This option gives you up to 250gb of disk space per core. Its a great location for temporary storage of information in a way that traditional apps will be familiar with. However, its not persistent so if you put anything there you need to make sure will be available if the VM instance gets repaved, then copy it to Blob storage. Also, this storage is specific to a given role instance. So if you have two instances of the same role, they each have their own local storage buckets.
Alternatively, you can use Azure Drive, which allows you to keep the information persisted, but still doesn't allow multiple parallel writes.
If IaaS, then you can just mount a data disk to the VM and write to it directly. Data disks are already persisted to blob storage so there's little risk of data loss.
Just from my understanding and please correct me if anything wrong.
In Windows Azure Web Site, the content of your website will be stored in blob storage and mounted as a drive, which will be used for all instances your web site is using. And since it's in blob storage it's persistent. So if you need the local file system I think you can use the folders under your web site root path. But I don't think you can use the system tmp or temp folder.