I have few (around 10) Windows Services on my existing environment. We are planning to migrate to Azure with the following.
Host our database on Azure SQL Database.
Install all the 10 Windows Services in a Azure Virtual Machine. Please note that these Windows Services does bulk inserts into the Azure SQL databases.
Take 2 instances of VM (specified in #2 above) and configure them in an Availability Set to avail the SLA.
I have two questions.
Do I need to install all my 10 Services to both the VMs?
Will that NOT be reduntant running the Windows Services in both the VMs? So, the Bulk Inserts will be duplicated to the Azure SQL Databases.
Please let me know if I am thinking in the right direction or are there any alternate methods (like Worker Roles) of utilizing the existing Windows Services on Azure with minimum or no changes?
It looks like, I got an answer to my question. When there are two VMs in a given Availability Set, ONLY one will be up and running. The other VM will come into picture only when the primary VM is down.
Thanks,
Prawin
If you are to take advantage of Azures SLA you will need to have at least 2 VM's (from within the same family) in an availability set. The SLA covers the VM's in the availability set NOT what you are running on the OS. For example if you have all services running on one instance and that box goes down, you lose those services till the box recycles. Microsoft is still covered on their SLA because at least one of the VM's in the availability set is available.
Related
The scenario is as follows:
In company premise, there is a network that consists few machines.
The company has an Azure subscription.
Requirement:
To monitor the company's Network/Machines via Azure
If the company resource goes beyond a threshold limit then trigger alerts. Example, network bandwidth consumption, machine CPU/Memory usage, etc.
When such alerts occur then spin up new virtual machines or VM scale sets in Azure to handle the load.
The purpose is if the machines in on-prem goes above threshold limit then automatically provision VMs in Azure, as there are only few on-prem machines.
Please guide how to implement these use cases?
your question is a little confusing. You mention machines on premises and using Azure to monitor them. You can monitor on premises VMs using Azure but then you mention provisioning new Azure VMs via Scale Sets.
I'm not 100% where your workload is but assuming it is in Azure then if you are using VM Scale Sets it's very easy to scale in and out based on resource utilisation.
This can be configured as described here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machine-scale-sets/virtual-machine-scale-sets-autoscale-portal
We've got a Atlassian Bitbucket Datacentre installation which we want to DR to another region.
Can Azure Site Recovery be used to replicate the PostgreSQL server?
Can Azure Site Recovery be used to replicate the NFS server?
Can Azure Site Recovery be used to replicate a VM from a VMSS?
It would be great if we could orchestrate the whole thing with ASR as it would make PITR a breeze. If not we'd need to look at each item individually then work out how to coordinate the retores to the same point in time.
Thanks
Phill
This is a generic question and I would need more detailed idea about your Infrastructure. But yes you can use ASR to replicate these servers. ASR is a mechanism that installs an agent on the source machine and this agent replicates all the data to PS and eventually uploaded to Azure.
However it isn't application aware which means it won't give you PITR for DBs, but you will have an option to failover (restore) entire machine even 5 minutes ago. Since ASR creates recovery point every 5 minutes. It isn't a file level replication but a server level replication. Below article implies for Vmware and Physical machines replication to Azure.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/vmware-azure-architecture
Let me know if this helps.
am new to windows azure. I recently set up a vm and host a website, according to the SLA i need to have 2 VMs in the availability set. Now i did set up the second VM.
My questions what do i need to use the second VM for?
if i setup load balancing does azure redirect user to the second VM? this second VM has nothing in it.
Please i will like to know this and is it possible to replicate the content of the first VM to the second one, so each time the first one is down the second VM can take over.
Thanks
At first, You must understand the statement of minimum two machines to get 99.95% SLA. It is not about "reserving" resources for use in case of fault or update (fault domain and update domain in availability set). Your application must be created as multi-tenant, so You need to run Your application on two servers, connected to the availability set. You can synchronize storage with GlusterFS (if You use Linux) or other distributed file system. You also can use Azure Files service (SMB as a service) to share storage. For sharing DB (in example MySQL) You need a cluster (independent or distributed through Your two machines).
So... You must to start think in "cloud way" instead of typical one VM administration.
How to autoscale virtual machines(IaaS approach) in azure instead of web/worker role autoscaling in azure?
You can now Autoscale Virtual machines in Azure directly in the Azure Management Portal. ScottGu has a post about it on his blog.
The important thing to autoscale VM's is you must proactively provision the Max # of VM's you think you'll need to handle your peak capacity, and add them to the same availability set.
For example, if on the busiest day of the week it takes 6 machines to handle all of your traffic, then you need to create 6 instances and install your application on it, configure it to handle traffic etc.... and then add it to an availability set with the other 5 machines.
Once you've done this, you can navigate to the Cloud Service that contains all of your virtual machines and click on the Scale tab. You should see a list of your availability sets, and it should tell you the # of machines you can scale over. Choose a metric (either CPU or Queue today), and then range of machines you want to scale between. You can scale between 1 and the total # of machines.
When load is low -- Azure will turn off machines (so you don't have to pay for them), and when load is high, Azure will turn those machines back on.
Auto-scaling on the IaaS level doesn't really make sense. Even if azure could detect high CPU usage and start a new VM based on it, what then? you still need to install your application on that VM automatically somehow.
What you are looking for is something that runs your app on azure, and installs new instances on new VM's if necessary. That "something" is called PaaS enabler. Basically it is another abstraction level between your app and the azure IaaS.
there are a couple of them out there :
Cloudify, CloudFoundary, Juju
as far as i know, only one that supports Azure is Cloudify. you can check out how to configure azure using Cloudify here : Configuring Azure
you can also check out the community - Cloudify Forum, or post questions here for assistance.
Disclaimer: I work for Gigaspaces, developing the Cloudify product line.
According to this it's possible to scale out IaaS with Availability sets by pre-provisioning the number of boxes: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kaevans/2015/02/20/autoscaling-azurevirtual-machines/
I am totally new to cloud services, and using Windows Azure, I need a web server and a database server, each with 16gb of RAM. However, the extra large windows virtual machines only have 14gb of RAM. How would I go about adding 2gb of RAM to each of these servers, or do I need to do something else, such as incorporate a SQL database? I don't need to know the specifics of installation, all I need to know right now is what needs to be paid for, as I am just trying to figure out the price for everything. Thank you.
The Extra Large (XL) VM size provides 14GB available RAM. This applies to both Virtual Machines (IaaS) and web/worker roles (PaaS). There are no other VM sizes that provide more RAM than that. There's nothing you can do to add 2 extra GB.
UPDATE April 16, 2013: There are now two new sizes: 28GB/4-core and 56GB-8-core, available to Virtual Machines (not for Cloud Services e.g. web & worker roles). Announcement here. There's also a new SharePoint template in the Virtual Machine image gallery (since you mentioned using SharePoint) as well as a SQL Server template.
UPDATE APRIL 30, 2013: The new 28GB/56GB sizes are now available with Cloud Services, coincident with the release of Azure SDK 2.0 for .NET. Details here.
Just to add a bit, regarding web servers: Unlike on-premises servers where it's typically economical to buy the largest machine possible, it's better in Windows Azure to go with smaller VMs and have more of them. So, for a web server, go with the smallest VM size that would still run your software. Then, to handle additional traffic, scale to more web instances. As traffic ebbs, reduce the instance count. Load will be distributed amongst all of of the web servers (which are stateless - no user affinity to a specific instance).