I'm doing some research to migrate virtual machines(vmware) to the new Azure Resource Manager portal.
I already succeeded doing this with powershell. But I was wondering if there where other methods to do this faster and more efficient with less downtime?
There is the Azure Site Recovery:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/azure-site-recovery-ga-move-vmware-aws-hyper-v-and-physical-servers-to-azure/
"Customers can replicate on-premises workloads to Azure with Azure Site Recovery for 31 days at no charge, effectively making migration to Azure free."
I do enjoy the cunning of #alexandr's solution! However the official solution from Microsoft is that they are currently building the tools to automate this for you.
from the Transitioning to the Resource Manager model blog. There are a basic set of scripts and a timeline for the more complex migrations (no VNet etc)
To directly answer your question, it seems like Powershell is the tool of choice for managing the migration. (I imagine if you leave it for long enough there will be a 'migrate' button in the portal, as they seem very eager to move everyone away from ASM)
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We are a small company and are still unsure how to start all this azure stuff.
Ok, we are clear on the technicalities like table storage and queues and all the that stuff, what we don't know about at all is how to set up the organization around developing for our developers. Which/how many azure accounts, shared or individual ones.
So far we've done classic windows development, so everyone has his environment, unit tests run either locally or on the build server (after pushing to mercurial or git), deployment from the build server.
The thing is that we want to use Azure not just as a hoster, but the full set, like blob/document/table storage, event hubs, storage queues, ReliableActors and everything. Things we can't do locally.
What's the appropriate way for azure then? There are about 20 to 30 developers and most have the enterprise msdn subscription.
What is a "company or organisation" account for? Should developers have their own accounts? Does DevOps need their passwords for all the bamboo or jenkins build stuff?
I went through this recently and I can share a few tips here since I'm also not aware of a DevOps specific platform to share this on StackExhange.
As far as organizing your subscriptions go look at Azure Pay-As-You-Go Dev/Test Subscriptions link
or Enterprise Dev/Test link if you are an Enterprise Agreement customer. These are aimed at development teams, you get discounted rates since you don't pay for software licenses that are already included in your MSDN subscription.
It is best to use individual developer subscriptions for exploration, POC etc while running your main dev workload in the Dev-Test subscription. It looks tempting to try and save a buck by spreading the work across multiple MSDN subscriptions to use the credits but I wouldn't recommend it. It becomes a pain to manage 20~30 subscriptions and they can run out of credits and things stop working. If you remove the spending limit on all the subscriptions you run the risk of racking up a huge bill accidently if multiple devs leave VMs on or add premium storage to VMs etc.
As far as DevOps go, use RBAC and Azure Active Directory to manage access and certificates for your DevOps tooling, build servers, release management etc don't use individual developer credentials for this.
And I agree with the other comments, get in touch with MS as well, this is just the tip of the iceberg but it will get you started.
Is it possible, using the Azure portal or some other means, to export the subscriptions configuration, for example as an XML file?
I mean things like details of web sites / roles, virtual machines, the size of the machines etc?
Then I could export every day and use a diff tool to check nothing has changed by mistake....
Just thought I'd ask before I write a giant PowerShell script.
I agree this would be a nice feature to have. It's often easier to build out the environment via the portal, but copying that from one tenant (dev) to another (prod) would be much faster and easier if it could be exported to JSON or XML and processed via PowerShell.
Azure Resource manager however does not support resources like Cloud Services, API Management, Mobile Services, Azure Scheduler, Azure Automation, Azure Active Directory, Recovery Services, Media Services, etc. ...
So the summary is - No, there is no such service yet to help you export all your subscriptions configurations.
If you just look for Virtual Machines and Web Sites, then Azure Resource Manager may be in help. But if you look for a complete backup - there is no way to easily achieve this today (2015-03-17).
Probably you could write some Powershell script combining the power of Azure Service Management + Azure Resource Manager, but frankly I am not really sure whether that would also help.
Is there any way to save the complete state of my azure configuration?
Basically, I just created a demo for a project I'm working on. This demo has a website/webjob, scheduler, storage queue, storage blob, redis cache and documentDB. I have configured these components in terms of size/scale/schedules but now the demo is done.
I don't want to pay for these services and I don't need them online for now. However, I don't want to have to recreate and reconfigure them if I need to relaunch the demo in a month.
Is there a way to save my current azure configurations to a file and then to be able to recreate all the services again automatically (with a script or a small program)?
Thanks!
This is a very good question, that sums up a historical problem we're in the process of making easier and more flexible. I'll answer this question with two parts.
First and foremost, you have tools like the PowerShell cmdlets now, that you can script out the creation of an entire "world" in Azure and then re-run whenever you want, against a subscription, to scaffold out a whole architecture. You can also use the management libraries for .NET to do this from a .NET application. When we embarked on the VS WebJobs tooling, for instance, I worked up a prototype for my developers on using MAML to create WebJobs and scheduler job collections. You can see the demo code for that here: https://github.com/bradygaster/maml-demo-scheduled-webjob-creator
We've also recently embarked on new mission of re-creating a lot of the management APIs so that they support the notion of templates and resource groups, to marry up with the new portal experience. Here's a great MSDN article that discusses how the PowerShell cmdlets for the Gallery could be used to pull down a list of the various templates that could then be pushed back up as fully-baked architectures running in Azure. You have the capability of building these templates yourself, then you could use these cmdlets to fan out and create things that you write up in your own custom templates. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn654596.aspx
Hope this helps!
For Azure websites you can use the Back and Restore option to store the site and restore it back when you want to demo again, But all you have to do is Stop the services and you should be able to keep the demo without incurring cost.
We started using Azure platform. Especially we are having issues in Web Sites platform. How we give different kinds of access to our development team.
Right now the development team could access the production deployment slots.
We need to be able specify the access to the system according to their roles in the organization.
Have your development team use their own subscription for development. That way, they never have access to your production environment. This is something I personally practice and recommend to customers.
This gives you the added benefit of also separating development and QA costs with your production deployment costs. In development, you may choose to use smaller and fewer instances (to control costs). Yet, in production, you may prefer larger and more instances (to meet demand). Having a separate subscription for each enables these options for you.
This is also an approach demonstrated in the Patterns and Practices Guide. It's a little dated and is in the context of Cloud Services (not Websites). But, the overarching principles still apply.
Microsoft has Role-Based Access Control in the roadmap for the new Azure portal but have not committed to any target dates.
If you're using Azure AD to manage Azure access there are some different roles available there.
Edit: Basic RBAC functionality was added to the new Azure Portal back in September.
Microsoft promises to discontinue the old (Silverlight) Management Portal "this summer" so we now have to use the new (HTML 5) portal.
I personally and several people I've talked to find the new portal awful because it doesn't provide as fine control as the old one did. We find it so bad that maybe even consider writing our own tools.
Yes, I'm well aware about cmdlets, Management API, but I'd prefer something with GUI more or less like the old portal.
What other ways are there to manage Azure cloud services that provide GUI and fine control?
Do take a look at Cerebrata tools especially Azure Management Studio: http://www.cerebrata.com.
If you aren't ready for all the features of Azure Management Studio then try the free Blob manipulation tool, Azure Explorer, which is robust and very easy to use:
http://www.cerebrata.com/labs/azure-explorer
(Short video review here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO7g7XCDEIg)
For what it's worth, I think the Azure team have done a really excellent job with the Portal, including just the right amount of functionality for the majority of users.