Download vhd of Windows Azure Cloud Service - azure

Is it possible to download a vhd (or vhdx) image of Windows Azure Cloud Service and run it locally on my computer in Hyper-V?
How to do that?
Thanks

For Cloud Services (web/worker roles), you cannot download a vhd. Remember that the running Windows image is created with a baseline image, then your deployment package is attached and your code is executed. If you spin up another instance, it results in the same starting point. There's no way to take the running machine and capture a vhd. VHD-based operation is all part of Virtual Machines. And with those, you can download the vhd.

Related

Windows version 1809/build 17763 VM requirement

I have a requirement of Windows version 1809/build 17763 VM on azure for some task. I choked and was not able to find the VM on azure. How can I setup windows VM with above version/build
You can create a VHD with Windows OS version you need locally then upload this VHD to Azure and use this VHD to create a managed image so that you can create VMs by this managed image.
For detailed steps see this official doc.
Btw, I noticed that there is a VM image based on windows server 1809, you can find it while creating VMs => see all images:

Access Azure Virtual Machine File Structure from outside the VM

We have Windows Server 2016 Azure Virtual Machines using managed disks.
I am trying to create an Azure Data Factory pipeline that will let me copy certain files from a folder on the hard drives of those VMs, to our Azure SQL Server. I was quite surprised to see no ADF connectors available for Azure VMs; then I checked Logic Apps - same issue, no available connectors for connecting to Azure VM's there either.
Then I did some Googling to find out how, in general, you can access an Azure VM file structure from outside (without using Remote Desktop) and was even more surprised to see that there isn't any info out there about this (not even that it can't be done).
Is it possible for me to access the file system of my Windows Server 2016 Azure VM without using Remote Desktop? The VM's are running Managed Disks if that makes any difference.
You can either ssh your_vm_ip and then use rsync command to download or upload files.
rsync -au --progress your_user_name#ip.ip.ip.ip:/remote_dir/remote_dir/ /local_dir/local_dir/
Otherwise you can install Dropbox in the VM and your local computer, transfering small files in the shared Dropbox folder is very fast..
Here are some instruction slides on the Azure storage system and their Storage Explorer App.

Migrate EC2 from AWS to Azure

We have a requirement to Migrate EC2 instance of AWS to Azure as VM, have been trying to implement the same from this source,
unable to complete the process. Tried and stuck on Protection Group.
I'm looking in these other links
Migrating a VM from EC2 to Azure at 300 Mbps For this I'm able to create VM in Classis portal but unable connect to it only port 80 is active all other ports are not working
Migrate virtual machines in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to Azure with Azure Site Recovery
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/site-recovery-vmware-to-azure
https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/vm-import/ on trying this I'm getting this unresolved EC2 API export to S3 ACL issue
Can anyone suggest me a workflow on how to implement this?
I achieved this by downloading AWS EC2 VHD to an Hyper-V enabled machine on-premises.
Following are the steps.
Create VM from VHD and Remove AWS related software.
Open Hyper-V manager and create VM from the downloaded VHD.
Log in to the VM and uninstalled AWS related services from control panel (AWS Drivers, EC2configService, AWS Tools for Windows, AWS SSM Agent)
All these changes were affected on the VHD.
Upload the converted VHD to Azure Storage (using the Azure PowerShell cmdlets)
Create av Azure VM-Image from that VHD in Classic Azure Portal
Create an Azure VM using the new Image.
Created a classic VM in Azure portal.
For creating a VM under Resource manager, created VHD of newly migrated VM and using that created a new VM in azure portal.
Mention any workflow other than this.
There are multiple ways to migrate machines.
Azure Migrate: Server Migration is one tool that lets you do that and is the recommended way to rehost x86 machines to Azure. You can treat the EC2 instance (AWS VM) as though it were a Physical machine and migrate it to Azure as long as the Operating System on the machine is supported by the Physical Server Migration flow (also check the kernel version to ensure it is supported) https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/migrate/tutorial-migrate-physical-virtual-machines
That being said, EC2 VMs may have some changes that you’ll need to make before migrating them, or it may cause issues once in Azure. For example if they are using cloudinit for VM provisioning, you may want to disable cloudinit on the VM before replicating it because the provisioning steps performed by cloudinit on the VM maybe AWS specific and wont be valid after the migration to Azure.
The other thing to note is if the VM is a PV VM (para-virtualized) and not a HVM VM you may not be able to run it as is because paravirtualized VMs use a custom boot sequence in AWS (you may be able to get over this challenge by installing GRUB 2 on the VM and building grub)
The recommendation, if you are using this approach, is to always perform a test migration first to test the process.

What happened to VMDepot?

I know that bitnami has moved all his images to the Azure Marketplace, but there was others VM on vmdepot. Now there is no simple way to share virtual machines on Azure.
As you mentioned, Microsoft Azure decide to removed their old VM Depot Marketplace and all the Bitnami Images have been moved to their new Marketplace:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/.
You can create your a virtual machine image for the Azure Marketplace and publish it following the guide below:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/marketplace-publishing-vm-image-creation/

Client-Side: Accessing Windows Azure Drive?

I am developing an Azure application, part of which involves users browsing an online filesystem. TO do this, I am trying to use the Windows Azure drive, but I can't figure out how to access it from client side, or how to make it accessible on the server side.
At the moment, I only know how to make the drive:
CloudStorageAccount devStorage = CloudStorageAccount.DevelopmentStorageAccount;
CloudBlobClient client = devStorage.CreateCloudBlobClient();
CloudBlobContainer container = new CloudBlobContainer("teacher", client);
CloudDrive.InitializeCache(localCache.RootPath,
localCache.MaximumSizeInMegabytes);
CloudDrive drive = new CloudDrive(container.GetPageBlobReference("drive1").Uri, devStorage.Credentials);
drive.Create(50);
I am using C# as my development language.
All help is greatly appreciated!
There are couple of things you need to understand with Windows Azure Cloud Drive:
Cloud drives are actual Page Blobs which are stored on Windows Azure Blob storage and mount as a drive (you will get a drive letter depend on your machine drive statistics) in a machine where you can provide Windows Azure Run time environment.
Programmatic it is very easy to mount a cloud drive in your code as you showed in your example however one thing is missed that is to be sure to have Windows Azure RunTime environment where this code can run.
I have written a utility to mount azure drive within Windows Azure VM (Web, Worker or VM Role) located here:
http://mountvhdazurevm.codeplex.com/
You can run above tool directly in Windows Azure VM and can also this the exact same code in your Compute Emulator (Windows Azure Development Fabric) so the bottom line is as long as you can provide Windows Azure Runtime environment, you can mount a Page blob VHD drive.
I have seen several cases where someone asked me to mount a Windows Azure Page Blob as drive in local machine (client and server, anywhere) and the actual hurdle was to bring Windows Azure Run time in local environment because it is not available. In some cases a few person went ahead and tries to use Windows Azure SDK to have Windows Azure runtime made
available in their desktop, created a dummy web role and then mount the VHD which was mounted in local machine and a drive letter was made available as well. I am not sure about such kind of solution because this is not Windows Azure compute emulator is designed.
Hope this description provide you some guideline.
I'm not sure I understand your question properly, but it sounds like you want multiple client applications - presumably on machines that are not on Azure - to access your Azure drive?
Unfortunately, Azure drives can only be accessed from Azure web/worker or VM role instances.
I've written a WebDAV Server which runs on an Azure Website which will allow clients, including Windows Explorer and Office to connect to Azure Storage. It uses a combination of Table and Blob Storage to store the file structure and files. I've tested it with Windows Explorer and Word 2013. Although this isn't a clouddrive solution it's still using Azure Storage as a backend and it's accessible from WebDAV clients. You might find it useful..
https://github.com/ichivers/AzureDAV
One additional point to the existing answers. You can always download the blob backing your Cloud Drive and mount it on a local system. The blob is really just a VHD. However, the download time isn't going to trivial unless the drive is small.
Erick

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