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
Related
we have the new asp.net core web application running on Azure as App Service.
Because of the backward compatibility, we have a bunch of files (from the old version of the application) stored on VM Windows machine running at Azure too. Those files must be there!
And we need to access them from Linux App Service as files and directories as they are.
We wanted to use File Share. But because of the App Service sandbox, it is not possible.
Any help?
As of now you have option of mounting or using azure storage with Linux App Service.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/app-service/configure-connect-to-azure-storage?tabs=portal&pivots=container-linux
You can think of using or moving your filesystem from Azure VM to azure storage and further use Linux App Service mounting to Azure Storage.
The above article contains video with every step on how to do that.
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.
Just deployed my App to Azure. Everything works fine.
I'm currently running some legacy code on my app that I cannot upgrade right now, and it makes use of some files on the local VM Storage.
I need to find a way to keep all the cloud instances folder synced. Someone wrote a plugin that seems to do this using the Microsoft Sync Framework, but it runs on Azure SDK 1.5:
https://github.com/Interop-Bridges/Windows-Azure-File-System-Durability-Plugin
Does anyone know of a similar implementation for the current version of the SDK? or a better solution for this scenario?
You could use the CloudDrive feature of Windows Azure. You can put a .VHD file into the blob storage and mount it as a drive in your compute service.
But keep in mind that if you have multiple instance in your computing service, only one instance has read/write access to the VHD. You should share the VHD Drive among all your instances using standard network share technology.
So I am a little bit confused about the Azure feature to create virtual machines(i.e VMRoles).
When I do a quick create via the managment portal, I am not asked to specify nor a hosted service nor a storage account. After I click 'create' I see that a storage account is generated for me automatically with some unique name, but I don't see the same for a hosted service. Is a hosted service not needed to create a VM?
The thing that is confusing is that it seems like every other method for creating a VM does require me to specify a hosted service (Azure PowerShell, REST API). And indeed after I create the VM using one of these methods I see my VM inside the hosted service...
Anyone can explain this?
Thanks in advance
Please do not confuse Windows Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS, stateful) with Windows Azure VMRole (PaaS, stateless).
As for creation - the process behind the portal is automated. For me, I have a separate Cloud Service for each Virtual Machine I've created (along with the auto generated storage account). However as all operations are asyc, and I also guess the Microsoft teams are using some kind of CQRS pattern behind the portal, it might take some time for all the components behind a Virtual Machine to appear. While the API strictly requires everything to be ready set, before you actually create the Virtual Machine. My guess is that soon you will also see a cloud service created for your VM (it usually is with the name of the Virtual Machine you created). Also, if you have noticed, the public URI for accessing your Virtual Machine (be it RDP or SSH) has the format of [your_vm_name].cloudapp.net - so this is a Cloud Service (formerly known as Hosted Service).
First of all Windows Azure Virtual Machines and VM Role are two separate things. Based on what you have explained it seems you are trying to create a Windows Azure Virtual Machine so I will explain you in short how it works:
Very first: In order to create a Windows Azure Virtual Machine you need a VHD which has OS Image. You can use one from Gallery or you can upload one by yourself to your specific Blob Azure Storage.
When you use Quick create or create the process is exactly same in the background however during quick create lots of settings is already predefined as will quick create you will only get Windows OS VHD to choose. In both cases a storage account is used to copy the OS VHD (if it is not part of your OS image collection). In most of the cases a previously created storage account is used, so you may think in was not created but in fact the storage account was used to copy the VHD from repo. This may not be the case if you create a VM from an image which is already in your OS VHD collection.
With quick create the DNS name you set is become the VM name but with create you have option to create a different DNS name for your application but they needed in both cases. In any case the DNS name will bind to your VM, the same DNS name will distinguish your VM from others and a must to configure for any VM.
I believe that the cloud service is not surfaced for a single quick-create Virtual Machine. This is to make Virtual Machines as easy to use as possible. The cloud service would be created and be displayed on the portal were a second virtual machine to be added to the cloud service.
This might not be so much of a programming question..but still..
I have the need of getting a site the currently is hosted in azure down to a local development environment.. is there anyway to do that?, any tools or such?..
Thanks in advance!
Not currently. Once the cloud service deployment package has been handed over to the Azure Fabric controller, there is no way to reclaim it, even if you submit a support ticket. The closest you can get to this is either upload packages to Windows Azure Blob Storage first, then deploy from there, or enable remote desktop and copy the files from inside the VM to an external storage account.
My suggestion would be to do one of the following:
If you have RDP enabled, you can remote in and grab the files
Otherwise, I would suggest creating a support case and having Microsoft help you get out the files: https://support.microsoft.com/oas/default.aspx?&c1=501&gprid=14928&&st=1&wfxredirect=1&sd=gn