Search results matching tag 'IaaS'

SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services – Updated Documentation and Best Practices for GA, Upcoming Blogs

SQLOS Team — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 22:04:16 GMT

It’s been just over a week since Windows Azure announced the GA of Infrastructure Services, marking the beginning of a fully supported Infrastructure as a Service in Windows Azure, with SQL Server as a major component.

Pre-installed SQL Server VMs are available for pay-per-hour usage in the Windows Azure gallery. Currently Enterprise, Standard and Web edition VMs running on Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 are available, with more SQL Server editions coming soon. SQL Server editions running on Windows Server 2012 images are also on the way. For more details on the scenarios and benefits of running SQL Server workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines, please visit the SQL Server blog post here.

We are very happy to announce that the updated technical documentation for deploying and running SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructures Services is now available online. When deploying SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines, we recommend that you follow the detailed guidance given in the new SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines documentation in the library. This documentation includes a series of articles and tutorials that provide detailed guidance on:

Over the next few weeks we are planning a series of blog posts to provide more detailed information on specific SQL Server topics. Subjects in the pipeline include: high availability, disaster recovery, performance, application migration and security. Let us know what topics you would like to see covered in this series by adding comments to this post.

SQL Server Team

Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

Creating a Windows Azure Virtual Machine - the RIGHT Way

BuckWoody — Wed, 17 Apr 2013 13:08:00 GMT

Windows Azure has added Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), the ability to deploy, run and manage Virtual Machines, to its growing list of services. You can create Virtual Machines from a gallery, upload them from images you create locally on Hyper-V (that's right, you can do that, even from PowerShell) and of course you can just jump right in and just click the "Plus" sign at the bottom of the Windows Azure Management Portal, then hit Compute, then Virtual Machine and then Quick Create. Enter a few fields and you're off to the races.

Of course, that works just fine - but if you do it that way you're doing it wrong. There's a better way - there are a few steps you should take before you deploy a Virtual Machine, and a few steps after. In general, the process looks like this:

Create an Affinity Group
Create a Virtual Network
Create your Storage Account and Container
Create the Virtual Machine
Optionally, add an Availability Set

Note - some of these steps need to be done only once, others once per logical group of Virtual Machines, and so on. Hit the links below for more info on when to do what.

Step One: Create an Affinity Group

An Affinity Group is a logical grouping that dictates how Windows Azure will lay out the resources assigned to it. When you create services, you can assign them to the Affinity Group, and the Fabric will deploy those into the same Datacenter cluster. Create one these per grouping that you want.

More Detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156085.aspx

Steps to do that: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156209.aspx

Step Two: Create a Virtual Network

The TCP/IP address for Windows Azure Virtual Machines come from a predefined range. You can just let us pick that for you, or you can create your own Virtual Network that has a user-defined range of DHCP addresses, and even place a DNS Server or connect your local network to the Windows Azure network for your Virtual Machines. When you create the Virtual Network, you can assign it to the Affinity Group. It's a way of grouping machine networks together. Create one of these per group of Virtual Machines that you want to have the same DHCP and DNS Server.

More Detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156007.aspx

Steps to do that: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/services/networking/create-a-virtual-network/

Step Three: Create a Storage Account and Container

Windows Azure Virtual Machine Disks are stored in Windows Azure Storage. That's a great benefit. If you don't define a Storage Account and a Container first, The Windows Azure Management Portal will do that for you as you create the machine. Defining that Storage Account and Container ahead of time allows more control, and a better naming convention than what we'll pick for you. Read more to find out the strategy you should use to group the disks. Also, some workloads such as SQL Server have a best-practice of creating a separate disk for data and backups.

More Detail: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/blob-storage/#what-is

Steps to do that: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/how-to-guides/blob-storage/#header-3

Step Four: Create the Virtual Machine

You have a lot of choices here, from creating the Virtual Machine quickly, from a Gallery with pre-loaded software (like SQL Server), or even choosing from Windows or Linux. You can also create the Virtual Machines by uploading an image of your own, or create them through PowerShell. With the previous steps completed, you can select those pre-defined entries as you build the machine - just select them from the drop-down menus when prompted.

More Detail: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156003.aspx

Steps to do that:

Step Five: Optionally, Add an Availability Set

When you build more than one Virtual Machine (always a good idea, and required for availability) you can load-balance the IP ports for them, and you can also specify that they are on separate "fault domains" for greater availability. This is called an Availability Set. Even if you think you're only going to build one VM, you can add the Availability Set it up now and use it when you grow the systems. Create one of these per group of Virtual Machines you want to add into your High Availability strategy.

More Detail: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/common-tasks/manage-vm-availability/

Steps to do that: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/common-tasks/manage-vm-availability/#createset

When will my SQL Server Evaluation Edition expire?

SQLOS Team — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:43:00 GMT

The SQL Server Evaluation Edition is a great way to get a fully functional and free instance of SQL Server for learning and developing solutions. The edition has a built in expiry of 6 months from the time that you install it. I often install an Eval edition on a machine to set up a test or demo, and then 6 months later it comes as a complete surprise when it suddenly stops working.

Needless to say this can be mildly inconvenient, as it typically expires on the day you plan to demo it. It would be nice to get some kind warning.

This problem is exacerbated in the SQL Server virtual machine images in the Windows Azure gallery. While Azure VM's are in preview the SQL Server platform images are created with Evaluation edition, but the 6 month counter starts ticking when the VM is created rather than when you deploy it. This came to a head recently as a few months went by between platform image refreshes, so people deploying SQL VM images in Windows Azure were seeing them expire a few days later. See this thread for more details. Since then the SQL Server platform image has been refreshed so it won't be expiring for several months.

The problem with Azure VM's will go away soon as fully licensed pay-per-hour images will be available soon, and free trial offers will be available.

What happens when your SQL instance does expire? What are the options? Particularly if you've developed a working solution and want to put it into production?

One option is to purchase a license and enter the license key in SQL Server Installation Center->Maintenance->Upgrade License.

If you're using an Azure VM another option would be to migrate your application to a new VM.

One thing we've learned from this is that as long as time-bombed images are being used we need to be better at communicating and setting expectations about their expiration.

If you're running an Evaluation edition now, how can you tell when it's due to expire? One way is to run this query...

sp_configure 'show advanced options', 1;
RECONFIGURE
GO

sp_configure 'Agent XPs', 1;
RECONFIGURE
GO

DECLARE @daysleft int
DECLARE @instancename sysname
SELECT @instancename = CONVERT(sysname, SERVERPROPERTY('InstanceName'))
EXEC @daysleft = xp_qv '2715127595', @instancename
SELECT @daysleft 'Number of days left'

That will give you an answer in days until expiry. As of today, the SQL Server gallery image I launched a few days ago has 122 days left, which gives me a few months to do my demos and then forget that it's going to expire. Hopefully by that time I'll have either upgraded it or started with a refreshed or pay per hour image.

- Guy

Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

SQLOS and Cloud Infrastructure sessions at PASS Summit 2012

SQLOS Team — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:47:00 GMT

The SQL Pass Summit 2012, the largest yet, is in full swing. Here's a summary of the sessions this week on cloud infrastructure and SQLOS topics. Some of these were today, and you can catch the recordings. One more session takes place on Friday covering SQL Server solution patterns in Windows Azure VMs...

Also, catch Thursday's keynote with Quentin Clark which will feature a cool IaaS demo!

SQL Server in Windows Azure VM Sessions

CLD-309-A SQLCAT: Best Practices and Lessons Learned on SQL Server in an Azure VM

Steve Howard, Arvind Ranasaria - Wednesday 11/6 10:15

This session looked at some best practices to optimize Networking, Memory, Disk IO and high availability based on lessons learned during SQLCat work with customer deployments. Well worth catching the recording.

SQL Server in Azure VM patterns: Hybrid Disaster Recovery, data movement and BI

Guy Bowerman, Peter Saddow, Michael Washam, Ross LoForte - Friday 11/9 9:45 Rm 613

[Note: In the guides this has an outdated title.]

This session has a focus on SQL Server Azure VM solutions. Starting with the basics and then going deeper into:

- New features in the Microsoft Assessment and Planning Toolkit 8.0 to help plan and size SQL VM migrations.
- A Look at a Windows Azure VM SQL Server app making use of load balancing and SQL Server high availability features.
- A BI case study running SQL BI components in Azure VMs and making use of Windows 8 tiles.
- A training class in a VM case study.

SQLOS Sessions

DBA-500-HD Inside SQLOS 2012 (half-day session)

Bob Ward - Wednesday 11/6 1:30pm

Bob Ward from CSS applies his wealth of experience to look at the internals of SQLOS and what's changed in the various SQL 2012 components, including memory, resource governor, scheduler.

DBA-403-M: SQLCAT: Memory Manager Changes in SQL Server 2012

Gus Apostol, Jerome Halmans - 1:30pm

Covers the redesigned SQLOS memory manager in SQL Server 2012 including the new page allocator for any size pages (and all that implies), DMVs, demo's. Not sure why this was placed at the same time as the SQLOS half-day session, but since it's recorded it's available for catch-up.

- Guy

Originally posted at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlosteam/

Declarative Architectures in Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

BuckWoody — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 14:00:00 GMT

I deal with computing architectures by first laying out requirements, and then laying in any constraints for it's success. Only then do I bring in computing elements to apply to the system. As an example, a requirement might be "world-side availability" and a constraint might be "with less than 80ms response time and full HA" or something similar. Then I can choose from the best fit of technologies which range from full-up on-premises computing to IaaS, PaaS or SaaS.

I also deal in abstraction layers - on-premises systems are fully under your control, in IaaS the hardware is abstracted (but not the OS, scale, runtimes and so on), in PaaS the hardware and the OS is abstracted and you focus on code and data only, and in SaaS everything is abstracted - you merely purchase the function you want (like an e-mail server or some such) and simply use it.

When you think about solutions this way, the architecture moves to the primary factor in your decision. It's problem-first architecting, and then laying in whatever technology or vendor best fixes the problem.

To that end, most architects design a solution using a graphical tool (I use Visio) and then creating documents that let the rest of the team (and business) know what is required. It's the template, or recipe, for the solution. This is extremely easy to do for SaaS - you merely point out what the needs are, research the vendor and present the findings (and bill) to the business. IT might not even be involved there. In PaaS it's not much more complicated - you use the same Application Lifecycle Management and design tools you always have for code, such as Visual Studio or some other process and toolset, and you can "stamp out" the application in multiple locations, update it and so on.

IaaS is another story. Here you have multiple machines, operating systems, patches, virus scanning, run-times, scale-patterns and tools and much more that you have to deal with, since essentially it's just an in-house system being hosted by someone else. You can certainly automate builds of servers - we do this as technical professionals every day. From Windows to Linux, it's simple enough to create a "build script" that makes a system just like the one we made yesterday. What is more problematic is being able to tie those systems together in a coherent way (as a solution) and then stamp that out repeatedly, especially when you might want to deploy that solution on-premises, or in one cloud vendor or another.

Lately I've been working with a company called RightScale that does exactly this. I'll point you to their site for more info, but the general idea is that you document out your intent for a set of servers, and it will deploy them to on-premises private clouds, Windows Azure, and other public cloud providers all from the same script. In other words, it doesn't contain the images or anything like that - it contains the scripts to build them on-premises in private clouds or on a public cloud vendor like Microsoft.

Using a tool like this, you combine the steps of designing a system (all the way down to passwords and accounts if you wish) and then the document drives the distribution and implementation of that intent. As time goes on and more and more companies implement solutions on various providers (perhaps for HA and DR) then this becomes a compelling investigation.

The RightScale information is here, if you want to investigate it further. Yes, there are other methods I've found, but most are tied to a single kind of cloud, and I'm not into vendor lock-in.

Poppa Bear Level - Hands-on

Evaluate RightScale at no cost. Just bring your Windows Azure credentials and follow the these tutorials:
Sign Up for Windows Azure - http://support.rightscale.com/09-Clouds/Azure/Tutorials/Sign_up_for_Windows_Azure
Add Windows Azure to a RightScale Account

Windows Azure Virtual Machines 3-tier Deployment - http://support.rightscale.com/09-Clouds/Azure/Tutorials/3_Tier_Deployment_with_Windows_Azure

Momma Bear Level - Just the Right level... ;0)

Windows Azure Evaluation Guide - if you are new to Windows Azure Virtual Machines and new to RightScale, we recommend that you read the entire evaluation guide to gain a more complete understanding of the Windows Azure + RightScale solution.
Windows Azure Support Page @ support.rightscale.com - FAQ's, tutorials, etc. for Windows Azure Virtual Machines (Work in Progress)

Baby Bear Level - Marketing

Windows Azure Page @ www.rightscale.com - find overview information including solution briefs and presentation & demonstration videos
Scale and Automate Applications on Windows Azure Solution Brief - how RightScale makes Windows Azure Virtual Machine even better
SQL Server on Windows Azure Solution Brief - Run Highly Available SQL Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machines