I set up a simple Azure resource group with two servers. As I do not need the servers right now, I stopped and deallocated them.
One of the servers had a specific data disk. This data disk still seems to be alive. It has the status "Unattached" and I can export or delete it in Azure Portal...
Now - am I still being billed for this disc and if so - is there a smart way of somehow stash the disk until I need it again for my VM?
Best regards and thanks in advance
Yes, you are being billed for used storage, no way to "stash" the disk, only way is - deleting it. Or, perhaps, download it and delete it, and reupload at a later date.
Also, another option is to move disk to cold storage, that would save some costs, but Azure Storage is pretty cheap anyway.
Related
I've noticed that Azure blob storage now has the option to encrypt your data at rest.
There's no financial cost to this as far as I can tell and there's no indication/documentation anywhere that states how much of a performance impact this will have on access speeds (If any).
My question is, is there a good reason to not turn it on in most cases?
I imagine that if you've got a scenario where every millisecond counts and security isn't an issue (Such as for public containers perhaps), then maybe you might not want to, but otherwise it sounds like a nice feature to turn on for free (No such thing as a free lunch, but I can't find evidence of a downside beyond speculation).
If you enable SSE for your blobs, there is no distinguishable impact on performance.
The only case where you might think twice about it is if the storage account only holds VHD files that are being used by VMs. It is better to use Azure Disk Encryption for VMs, which uses DMCrypt for Linux VMs and Bitlocker for Windows VMs. Bitlocker, for example, will go back and encrypt everything on the disk.
SSE only encrypts newly written data. This means if you have a storage account with 100 GB of data and you enable SSE, that 100 GB of data is not encrypted unless you copy it to another container or something like that so it will encrypt it. However, any blobs added to that storage account WILL be encrypted.
I were using an Azure free trial and now is done. As soon I noticed the trial was over, I bought one Linux VM. But how can I transfer the data from the old one to the new?
Thanks.
If by "data" you mean content of your hard disks its most likely tied to a storage account. You could detach the disk from the previous VM and attach it to the new one. I'm not sure what the process is for linux but I know its possible.
SO I have been using the azure 3 month trial, to test out whether I want to use Microsoft Azure to host a project I am working on, however I have been very confused as I have run out of "Geo Redundant Storage" in the first month and I don't really understand why.
I have read this: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/ and the only thing I can make of it, is that it takes an average of how much storage you are using across a month, eg as long as I am using less then 35gb (for a 35gb limit) on average of storage space I am in the clear.
So under my Azure Subscriptsions 'STORAGE (GB/MONTH) - GEO REDUNDANT' it says '101.027% of 35 GB/month' (so I have reached my cap).
But I don't understand why this would be happening, all I have is a simple server with a nodejs web application and a redis database (pretty much an empty at the moment), all running on an ubuntu VM, and as I can't login and check storage now because it is disabled, but I am pretty sure it is nowhere even near 35gb total storage and never has been?
I am hoping someone can explain how the azure storage is charged or if I have missed something silly?
Edit: It just hit me that it could be redis, doing crazy things with IO? not sure if this is possible, but if it is, would I be better to use locally redundant storage and pay for locally redundant storage transactions?
Edit 2: On my graph it says I had been using 1.96gb / day. So that means its not the total harddrive space per month, is it harddrive space / day? (using 2gbs of data probably sounds about right with the OS included, if this is the case, that means they give you less then 2gb space on the trial, seems minute??)
This caused due to the limitation on the geo redundant storage I have faced the same issue to fix this just disable geo redundant storage from the Windows Azure preview portal.
Open the Windows Azure preview portal.
Select Storage left.
The select your storage.
Click Configure on the top.
Turn off geo-replication.
I hope this will help.
This is probably caused by the image of your Ubuntum VM. If you read the pricing details (the link in your question) you'll see this:
Compute hours do not include any Windows Azure Storage costs
associated with the image running in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. These costs are billed separately.
How large was the VM you created?
I have been doing some test and realized that when I stop a VM, I get a red warning saying that it still generates charges.
But on which basis ?
Furthermore, on some VM I created, the system without any reason starts fooling and reach a 98% CPU during several hours with no way to stop it or to connect with RDP. VM was totally dead and it's only after several hours that the stop command from the control panel succeeded.
Hope I will not been charged for this ? Who is able to decide if my VM is OK or fooling like a crazy horse ?
Moreover, is there any software allowing to transfer my VMs from Azure to my local system, and delete them on Azure to stop any charge ? for a simple backup with possibility to restore/restart them later ? Or to run them in my own hyper-V ?
Best regards
CS
Even if your VM is stopped, you still have resources that have been reserved for your VM (think of storage space, memory, CPU, ...) and these can't be 'sold' to anyone else. Deleting the VM will free these resoures and you'll no longer be charged.
Remember that Virtual Machines are still in preview, meaning things can go bad sometimes. And yes you'll be charged for this, but during the preview you get a 33% discount (more info here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/).
The persistent disks of your VMs are stored in a storage account as page blobs. Using tools like Azure Storage Explorer, CloudXplorer, CloudBerry, ... you can download these VHD files and simply mount them in Hyper-V (You'll need to remember that you'll need a license if you want to run the machine on-premises).
Note that, if you simply delete the VM the disks won't be deleted (they will stay in your storage account). In that case you only pay for storage (which is very cheap).
The price of VM depends on their size and nature (prenium or not).
Also you have to pay for the storage, but a 120GB disks is not billed fully, only effectively used space is.
You can use IaaS Managament Studio to easily calculate how much your blob disk cost, and see links to pricing pages of azure.
I have deployed a Worker Role to an Azure instance with remote access enabled.
When I remote to the server, I see disks C: and D: on the server.
I was told that Azure doesn't guarantee the durability of data stored in compute instance. However when I reboot/upgrade the service, I still see the previous data on disks C: and D:.
When will the data on disks C: and D: be lost?
Local disks are non-durable disks. In other words, not replicated. They may fail at any time and offer you no way to recover this data.
During role recycles (reboots), data typically will survive, but you cannot count on it surviving.
If your software must use a drive letter because you can't alter the code base, you can mount an NTFS volume inside a Page Blob (basically a Cloud Drive). You can do this from your OnStart(), then pass the drive letter to your app. Note: a cloud drive may only have one writer. So... if you have multiple instances, each instance would need to create its own cloud drive.
Because Azure is a cloud service, the hardware that your instance is running on is not guaranteed to be the same at any given point in time. As a result, you shouldn't rely on the data being present. Even though it may persist across reboots/upgrades, it isn't guaranteed.
See the second paragraph on Local Storage from this article. It makes the following recommendation:
If you require reliable durability of your data, want to share data between instances, or access your data outside of Windows Azure, consider using a Windows Azure Storage account or SQL Azure Database instead
It will usually be there after a reboot, but I have seen one case where I rebooted and something went wrong, so the instance was reset to a clean state. You cannot rely on the data surviving. I would imagine the same thing could happen with an upgrade.
Stopping and starting the instances will also probably lose the data, but I haven't checked.
Here's a quote from an MVP on the MSDN forums:
The local disk storage of Compute VMs (whether Web Role, Worker Role, or VM Role) is not persistent. It can go away at any time. The data center has the right to move and re-create your VMs whenever it deems it necessary. This could happen in response to a hardware failure, or simply because the data center needs to be reorganized. When this happens, you lose your VM disk files and go back to your deployment image. It is only a matter of time before this happens. This is normal behavior for cloud computing compute instances.