2 new members in the Azure Data Box family have been announced:
- Azure Data Box Edge is a 1 U rack-mountable appliance allowing you to run some of the Azure workloads (local compute to pre-process your data before transferring it to Azure, storage gateway to transfer data {usually files} between the appliance and your Azure Storage account, helping keeping most used files available in the appliance, or Machine Learning) closer to the usage location – usually not a ‘usual’ IT environment like factory floors or retail.
- Azure Data Box Gateway is a virtualized appliance (running either on VMWare or Hyper-V) helping synchronizing files between your environment and Azure Storage. It can sit either within your corporate network or your DMZ.
You can order the Data Box Edge or provision the Data Box Gateway from your Azure portal (http://aka.ms/databox-edge)
See below to access the configuration blade and get pricing.
This offer is currently available from East US, Southeast Asia, West Europe and West US 2 only and shipping is limited to few countries (more location will come in the future and you can also request by yourself to get your region and location from there too)
Use Azure Data Box Gateway
To provision your Azure Data Box Gateway connect to your Azure portal and search for data box edge or click on the link http://aka.ms/databox-edge to get directly to the Data Box blade
Then add a new device and select the Azure region where to deploy it and the location to ship your unit – I hope this will change a bit as there no device to ship for the Data Box Gateway. You can select any location for the shipping to then be able to download the virtualized appliance
Then select Create for the Data Box Gateway
Fill up the few fields (resource group and instance name) to provision the gateway
After few minutes the provisioning process is completed and you can access the resource from where you will be able to download the appliance by accessing the Device Setup blade
Then select the hypervisor you use, provision and start the virtual machine in your environment and generate an activation key
Direct links:
- Hyper-V https://aka.ms/dbe-vhdx-2012
- VMWare https://aka.ms/dbe-vmdk
All requirements for the virtual machine are available here https://aka.ms/dbe-network-req
The password to open a Windows session is available by hitting the Show details link in Step 3
Once the initial setup is completed, a pop up will be displayed. Logoff from the session and sign in again, then the URL to use will be displayed in the banner
Then once the virtual machine has been provisioned, you can generate a configuration key
Open a web browser and connect to the virtual appliance using https://<IP of the VM> and authenticate with the password provided in step 3; you will then be able to change it
You now have access to the Azure Data Box Gateway management portal
Click on the Activation link to set the configuration key you got in Step 4 from the Azure portal
Once activated you will then be able to define the connectivity type – fully connected or partially connected – to help you manage the data synchronization as well as how the Data Box Gateway can be managed; can be useful if you don’t want your Azure administrator changing settings on your box. On the Azure portal, you will see your device has been successfully activated and ready for use
I’m not going to go through all the settings available in the Data Box portal as they are quite self explanatory. The only one which is going to be really useful is the Diagnostic tests one to help you in troubleshooting issues with your Data Box Gateway
You can now define the on-premises network share you want to sync with Azure
Configure users, share and bandwidth
From the Azure portal you can define list of users which will be allowed to access data, share and bandwidth schedule to optimize the bandwidth usage to not impact your production time
The users list is not linked with Azure AD