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Azure WebSites - Can't Scale Sites Individually (New Web Hosting Plan Groups)
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I have multiple websites in my windows azure account, all are required to run in FREE mode. for one website i need to change scale option from Free to Reserved however all my websites will get affected with same scaling.
Why this happens?
Is there any specific reason for this type of behavior?
If so then how it would be charged for 5 websites when only 1 requires to run in Reserved Mode?
Thanks.
The way it works today: When you change from free to reserved, all of your web sites are converted to reserved. They will also all run on the same set of VM instances. So: If you go with a single Small VM reserved, you're paying for one Small VM, even though all web sites are now running in your reserved VM. And... if you convert back to free mode, all your sites convert back to free mode.
There's also a shared tier. ScottGu blogged about this a while back.
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My Azure 200$ free credits are expiring in 3 days , so i am trying to move my VM's & App Services to free to avoid incurring any charges. I dont want to delete my VM since it has all my code configured in Visual Studio and my environment is set up there.
I used below link to see what all services are free for 12 months , the list i see includes 750 hours of VM compute for B1S VM.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/free-account-faq/
I have already downsized my VM from DSv2 to B1S VM's. My question is regarding the VM Disk i am using , how to make sure it is using from the free quota . I see the link mentions that we have for 12 months free 128 GB of Managed Disks as a combination of two 64 GB (P6) SSD storage, plus 1 GB snapshot and 2 million I/O operations​ .
I am currently using a premium 128 GB LRS managed disk . However i could not find if i am using a P6 disk.
Thank You, I have sucessfull convert the original images of 128GB (P10) to 64GB (P6) to get REAL ACCESS to the free tier. I want to mention that I am new to Azure, so most of the terms are new to me (even the P6 and P10 thing) and after much research I can conclude that there is no such thing as free tier out of the box, there is no single image suitable for P6 disk on marketplace, thus is imposible to get real free tier just by sing in. The only way to get access to free tier is following the complex tuturial of this link:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/premier_developer/2018/01/26/how-to-shrink-a-managed-disk/
Is not an easy task because there are a lot of steps that are not mentioned and also a lot of terms that someone new to azure like me don't know, but it's work and i am the proof of it.
In the tutorial the most important things missing are:
-You got to run the first part in PowerShell on the VM that you want to convert (but this only works in some OS like Win10 but not in Win7) if you want to resize in an OS that dont support the Resize-Partition command you got to use a Partition software to do it. (there are a lot of freeware available for this)
-The second part must run in the PowerShell available in Azure Portal (you enter to this clicking the ">" next to notifications, and then select PowerShell intead Batch mode)
-Finally, tune up the variables is the main problem, because you got to create a lot of resources before use it, but the tutorial dont show this. Then you got to figure out how/where get and grant access, keys, and so on.
Most of the resources needed are charged (not included in free tier), so you got to do this in the first 30 days of the free tier (when you still got some credit of the initial $200)
BTW delete all the resources used to acomplish this is a must if you want free tier, because StorageBlobs are not part of the free tier.
Regards
128 GB premium is P10, therefore not eligible for the free tier. I suggest starting fresh with a new VM and migrate the content as there's no easy way to shrink a managed disk. If you want to give it a try, see this article:
How to shrink a managed disk
I am on a Windows Azure trial to evaluate migrating a number of commercial ASP.NET sites to Azure from dedicated hosting. All was going OK ... until just now!
Some background - the sites are set up under Web Roles (i.e. as opposed to Web Sites) using SQL Azure and SQL Reporting. The site content was under the X: drive (there was also a B: drive that seemed to be mapped to the same location). There are several days left of the trial.
Without any apparent warning my test sites suddenly stopped working. Examining the server (through RDP) I saw that the B: and X: drives had disappeared (just C: D & E: I think were left), and in IIS the application pools and Sites had disappeared. In the Portal however, nothing seemed to have changed - the same services & config seemed to be there.
Then about 20 minutes later the missing drives, app pools and sites reappeared and my test sites started working again! However, the B: drive was gone and now there was an F: drive (showing the same as X:); also the MS ReportViewer 2008 control that I had installed earlier in the day was gone. It is almost as if the server had been replaced with another (but the IIS config was restored from the original).
As you can imagine, this makes me worried! If this is something that could happen in production there is no way I would consider hosting commercial sites for clients on Azure (unless there is some redundancy system available to keep a site up when such a failure occurs).
Can anyone explain what may have happened, if this is possible/predictable under a live subscription, and if so how to work around it?
One other thing to keep in mind is that an Azure Web Role is not persistent. I'm not sure how you installed the MS Report Viewer 2008 control but anything you add or install outside of a deployment package when you push your solution to Azure is not guaranteed to be available at some future point.
I admit that I don't fully understand the full picture when it comes to the overall architecture of Azure but I do know that Web Roles can and do re-create themselves from time to time. When the role recycles, it returns to the state as it was when it was installed. This is why Microsoft suggests using at least 2 instances of your role because while one or the other may recycle they will never recycle both at the same time, part of what guarantees the 99.9% uptime.
You might also want to consider an Azure VM. They are persistent but require you to maintain the server in terms of updates and software much in the way I suspect you are already doing with your dedicated hosting.
I've been hosting my solution in a large (4 core) web role, also using SQL Azure, for about two years and have had great success with it. I have roughly 3,000 users and rarely see the utilization of my web role go over 2% (meaning I've got a lot of room to grow). Overall it is a great hosting solution in my opinion.
According to the Azure SLA Microsoft guarantees up time of 99.9% or higher on all its products per billing month. (20 min on the month would be .0004% loss, not being critical, just suggesting that they are still within their SLA)
Current status shows that sql databases were having issues in the US north last night, but all services appear to be up currently
Personally, I have seen the dashboard go down, and report very weird problems, but the services that I programmed to worked just fine all the way through it. When I experienced this problem it was reported on the Azure Status, the platform status and the twitter feed
While I have seen bumps, they are few and far between, and I find reliability to be perceptibly higher than other providers that I have worked with.
As for workarounds I would suggest a standard mode for your websites and increasing instances of the site. You might try looking into the new add ins that are available with the latest Azure release. Active Cloud Monitoring by Metrichub might be what you require.
It sounds like you're expecting the web role to act as a Virtual Machine instance.
Web Roles aren't persistent (the machine can be destroyed and recreated at any time), so you should do any additional required set up as a 'startup task' in your Azure project (never install software manually).
Because of this you need at least 2 instances so that rolling upgrades (i.e. Windows security patches, hotfixes and so on) can be performed automatically without having your entire deployment taken offline.
If this doesn't suit your use case then you should look at Azure Virtual Machines, but you'll need to manage updates and so on yourself. It's usually better to use Web Roles properly as you can then do scaling and so on a lot more easily.
Very suddenly without any changes or recent access my Azure virtual server is no longer available for RDP or web...I have logged into the azure control panel and everything appears to running without issue but it is not working.
I have checked the end points and they are present for both RDP and Web, totally weird.
I have 2 virtual servers and the other one is working fine and responding.
Anyone ever experience this? Just when my client wants to view his website as well...
http://cn-web-02.cloudapp.net is the URL
TIA
As I just answered for this question, Virtual Machines are in Preview and not in Production yet. There are several reasons why your Virtual Machines became unavailable (see other answer). Given that this is the second reported incident here today, it's a good guess it's related to the underlying Host OS being updated, which would take your Virtual Machine offline for a short period of time.
I tried your URL and it's available again. Just remember about this being in Preview, especially since you mention having a client that wants to view his website. If you put a production website in Virtual Machines, then you'll have to absorb the risk of not having an SLA.
Having said that: You can mitigate downtime risk by running two Virtual Machines, listening on a load-balanced input endpoint. Be sure to have both Virtual Machines in the same Availability Set. Doing that ensures that the Windows Azure fabric controller will not take both Virtual Machines offline at the same time when doing things like Host OS updates. If this were in Production, you'd then have a very high availability scenario. Even in Preview, you'll improve availability by taking advantage of Availability Sets. Note: You'll need to use some type of shared session cache, since visitors will now be sent to either one of your Virtual Machines.
I had same experience on it! We had 2 instances and all of its were re-imaged without any notified. I known it since we made some local change via RDP.
Reboot or Reimage may help! You may try!
Turns out it was an outage from Microsoft...for over 22 hours but everything is back up and running. This is the 2nd time in 6 months this has happened for long stretches...makes me a little nervous to say the least.
Thanks for the input everyone and for anyone that's interested MS have a good site that tracks the service levels on Azure. Windows Azure Service Dashboard
S
This question already has answers here:
Closed 10 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
App pool timeout for azure web sites
I am working on an asp.net mvc 4 app that is hosted in Windows Azure. This app will not have a lot of traffic as people will intermittently (once an hour) use it. I wanted to try using Windows Azure.
My app is currently set to use the FREE web site mode. I noticed that after 30 minutes, the site takes a long-time (> 5 seconds) to load. After that initial load, its fast. Then, if someone doesn't use it for another 30 minutes, it takes >5 seconds to load again.
I then tried upping the web site mode to a SHARED instance. I experienced the same problem there.
I then tried upping the web site mode to a RESERVED instance. The problem then goes away.
While I'd like to use Windows Azure, paying $50+ a month for a RESERVED instance is pretty expensive for a site that few have used up to this point. However, I can't have the initial lag. That will just defer the few users I have. You could say you get what you pay for. At the same time, I have a hard time believing others are experiencing this problem and not complaining. There has to be something I'm missing.
I figure the problem has to deal with the application pool resetting. However, I can't seem to figure a way around this. Is anyone familiar with this issue? Is there a way to fix it on a FREE or SHARED instance?
Thank you!
This is expected behavior based on how Windows Azure Web Sites work. The app pool they live in is spun up "on demand" and then hangs around for a time period.
For a detailed (and shameless plug) you can check out my article on this: http://www.simple-talk.com/dotnet/.net-framework/windows-azure-websites-%e2%80%93-a-new-hosting-model-for-windows-azure/
In summary:
Web Sites are hosted in a process on a farm of machines running IIS. If a site is idle for some time then the process is torn down automatically. Also, if the box is seeing a lot of pressure due to the other sites on the box the idle timeout may come down quite a bit (even as low as five minutes). When the next call comes in you'll see the process spun up again (likely on a completely different server). This is because you are in a shared environment (and is similar to how Heroku works). Once you move to reserved then you are the ONLY person on that virtual machine and if you suffer from noisy neighbor issues in processing its' because of your own stuff.
There are ways to keep your site "up", such as having a job that pings the url frequently; however, given that the idle timeout is somewhat fluid it may not solve every case. You can check out a recent post by Sandrino on how to use Azure Mobile Services as a job scheduler: http://fabriccontroller.net/blog/posts/job-scheduling-in-windows-azure/ . There are also 3rd party services available that can do the ping for you automatically.
To be honest, the web sites are a great feature for quick development and test, or even relatively low traffic sites as you are talking about. If you need a high level of uptime and better performance then you'll want to look at Reserved, or another option if the cost isn't in line with expectations.
This isn't an Azure problem. It is a "feature" of any web site hosted in IIS. The default time-out for app pools is 20 minutes. Read about App Pool timeouts here - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc771956(v=ws.10).aspx - one method is to create a keep alive page and ping the page every 10 minutes or so.
I've been working with Windows Azure and Amazon Web Services EC2 for a good many months now (almost getting to the years range) and I've seen something over and over that seems troubling.
When I deploy a .NET build into Windows Azure into a web role (or service role) it takes usually 6-15 minute for it to startup. In AWS's EC2 it takes about the same to startup the image and then a minute or two to deploy the app to IIS (pending of course its setup).
However when I boot up an AWS instance with SUSE Linux & Mono to run .NET, I get one of these booted and deploy code to it in about 2-3 minutes (again, pending it is setup).
What is going on with Windows OS images that cause them to take soooo long to boot up in the cloud? I don't want FUD, I'm curious about the specific details of what goes on that causes this. Any specific technical information regarding this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks.
As announced at PDC, Azure will soon start to offer full IIS on Azure web roles. Somewhere in the keynote demo by Don Box, he showed that this allows you to use the standard "publish" options in Visual Studio to deploy to the cloud very quickly.
If I recall correctly, part of what happens when starting a new Azure role is configuring the network components, and I remember some speaker at a conference mentioning once that that was very time consuming. This might explain why adding additional instances to an already running role is usually faster (but not always: I have seen this take much more than 15 minutes as well on ocassion).
Edit: also see this PDC session.
I don't think the EC2 behavior is specific to the cloud. Just compare boot times of Windows and Linux on a local system - in my experience, Linux just boots faster. Typically, this is because the number of services/demons launched is smaller, as is the number of disk accesses that each of them needs to make during startup.
As for Azure launch times: it's difficult to tell, and not comparable to machine boots (IMO). Nobody knows what Azure does when launching an application. It might be that they need to assemble the VM image first, or that a lot of logging/reporting happens that slows down things.
Don't forget, there is a Fabric controller that needs to check for fault zones and deploy your VMs across multiple fault zones (to give you high availability, at least when there are more than two instances). I can't say for sure, but that logic itself might take some extra time. This might also explain why network setup could be a little complicated.
This will of course explain the difference (if any) between boot times in the cloud and boot times for windows locally or in Amazon. Any difference in operating systems is completely dependent on the way the OS is built!