Live from a one day Azure Camp for IT

Cloud OS area

New trend usages:

social network (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn…)
data volume is increasing

80% are unstructured data

number of connected devices is increasing

7 M people for 6 M SIM card >>> more connected devices than people

Windows Server 2012 is the first ‘On Premise’ cloud OS which integrates with Windows Azure; meaning you can move your virtual machines from On Premises to Online service and vice versa

Windows Azure is composed by 8 datacenters across the world (4 in US, 2 in Europe and 2 in Asia)

Windows Azure is proposing:

web apps (web sites)
cloud apps (cloud services)
existing apps (virtual machines)

Windows Azure: network, load balancing and CDN

Windows Azure Connect

Simple network connectivity to implement and administer

Less scalability (1 to n – developer station to n virtual machine)

Windows Azure Virtual Network

Site to site VPN for Enterprise customers

This includes fault tolerance, load balancing and more complex scenario (n to n)

Consider Windows Azure datacenter as an extension of your branch office network; like a virtual/cloud branch office connected to your datacenter using a site to site VPN

Network plan must be compliant with the RFC 1918 – i.e. non routable IP addresses

Use case:

application running on Azure and consuming data from your On Premise databases
identity and access management based on your local Active Directory
monitoring and troubleshooting from your On Premises using System Center products suite

Current Limitations (v1)

5 virtual network
5 sites
1 virtual network per affinity group
1 local site
9 DNS server
IP v4 only
No broadcast or multicast
1 public IP address
1 IP address per site gateway
No IKE v2 support
No certificate authentication support

CDN

CDN: content Delivery Network

Distributed network associated with Point of Presence’s: 24 Azure CDN across the world

Users are connected through the nearest POP to reach the content requested

CDN delivers:

static content
pay per use
peak load

Windows Azure Virtual Machine

PaaS vs Iaas >> PaaS is more recommended to support peak load

Use IaaS for

LOB application
Infrastructure services

file share, database, identity management…

Duplicate existing environment

for example to deploy a pre production environment

Hybrid deployment

Available OS

Windows 2008 R2 to Windows 2012
Windows 2008 R2 with SQL 2012
BizTalk 2010 R2
OpenSuse 12.1
CentOS 6.2
Ubuntu 12.0.4

You have to pay even if your VM is stopped because you are consuming anyway some resources, such as storage space. To stop paying, you must remove the virtual machine but you can keep the hard drive used.

To upload an existing VHD from your On Premise to Windows Azure, you must upload it using page blob option through Azure Explorer

VHD must be fixed size

Virtual disk can be moved between Azure and On Premises

Any data written on Azure disks are duplicated 3 times

Virtual Hard Drive Limitations

System disk: 127 Go

Cache Default: ReadWrite
Available option: ReadOnly

Data disk: 1 To but can be aggregated

Cache Default: none
Available options: ReadOnly or ReadWrite

Options are set using PowerShell – Set-AzureOSDisk or Set-AzureDataDisk

To manage cache, Windows Azure Virtual Machine is using a Temporary Storage (not persistent)

Management and automation

Group Policy
Scripting cross platform (JS)
System Center
PowerShell
Rest API

You can use Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile to get an auto generated configuration file to connect to your Azure subscription using PowerShell (see http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj152882.aspx).

SLA

99.95 % with redundancy (4.38 h per year)
99.9 % (8.75 h per year)

Windows Azure and Active Directory

Active Directory database and SYSVOL must be located on data virtual drive

Writing cache is not supported with Active Directory (FUA – Forced Unit Access)

Ongoing request are free; Outgoing request are paid

Active Directory topology with AD on Azure must be managed identically than with ‘On Premises’ AD topology with Headquarter and branch office

It’s recommended to deploy a Global Catalog on Azure to optimize authentication request (and so usage and pricing)

AD architecture (i.e. trust relationship or replication) has to be defined accordingly to your need; this is exactly the same problem with On Premises

Azure Virtual Machine are using DHCP for IP address assignment so the AD wizard will alert you but that’s ok as the IP address lease never expires

DNS service must be deploy within the domain controller deployed on Azure as Azure DNS doesn’t support DNS requirements for AD (SRV record….)

SharePoint on Azure

You can also take a look to my post from the SharePoint Conference 2012 http://blog.hametbenoit.info/2012/11/14/sharepoint-windows-azure-iaas-deep-dive-for-sharepoint-it-professionals/

3 options:

On Premises: full control

Can be costly

IaaS: ie hosted SharePoint

Less control
Virtual Machine on Azure
Full SharePoint control
Simple application

SaaS: ie Office 365

Few control

Use of SharePoint on Azure for:

Internet Site: SharePoint for Internet Site
Development, test or pre production platforms
Hybrid mode

for example Business Intelligence or Extranet mode

Disaster Recovery

What about support? SharePoint 2010 or 2013 can be deployed (Foundation or Server) on Azure, except Fast for SharePoint 2010 (SharePoint 2013 Server is not yet supported but it’s coming soon)

Windows Azure Active Directory(AAD)

This is not AD running on Azure but an identity management and access control solution to provide access to cloud service

This allow identity consolidation between application on the cloud what ever the identity provider or organization used by the application, whatever the platform or the device use