7. Azure Virtual Networks
• Cross-Premises Virtual Network
• Cloud-Only Virtual Network
• Allows to group Virtual Machines
• Active Directory Domain Services in VNet
• Can Azure AD help you?
10. High Availability
• Location
• 17 regions
• Service offerings – (http://tinyurl.com/nf6uwsk)
• Affinity groups
• Colocation of cloud services and storage
• Host for an affinity group VNet
• VNet (Regional)
• Upgraded in late 2014
• http://tinyurl.com/nesvcjn
• Cloud Service
• Availability Sets
13. Disks, disks & more disks
• Always create large disks – you pay for actual use
• Performance of disks
• Blob storage for storing VHD
• Blobs are limited to 500 IOPS per disk
• Basic tier 300 IOPS per disk
• Storage space - http://tinyurl.com/n5ljfr8
• SQL Specific
• Format the disks with 64K allocation
• SQL Server service account – “Perform Volume Maintenance Tasks”
• Do NOT store anything in Temp Disk
14. Minimal IOPS
• Configuration DB – 2GB
• 40Mb for each 50,000 site collections
• Recovery model – full to simple
• Central Administration – 1GB
15. Content DB
• Formula
• Content DB size = ((D × V) × S) + (10 KB × (L + (V × D)))
• http://tinyurl.com/k75suaz
• Recycle bins
• Auditing
• 2Kb per entry
• Best practice 0.5 IOPS/GB
• range from 0.05 IOPS/GB to around 0.2 IOPS/GB
• RAID 10
• 5 Content DBs per disk
• Read & Write caching for Data Disks – Set-AzureDataDisk
• http://tinyurl.com/n4ktw46
• SQL File groups (Data files on different disks)
• Disk striping if you need over 1TB
Speaking Points:
Here’s another way to look at the cloud services taxonomy and how this taxonomy maps to the components in an IT infrastructure.
Packaged Software
With packaged software a customer would be responsible for managing the entire stack – ranging from the network connectivity to the applications.
IaaS
With Infrastructure as a Service, the lower levels of the stack are managed by a vendor. Some of these components can be provided by traditional hosters – in fact most of them have moved to having a virtualized offering.
Very few actually provide an OS
The customer is still responsible for managing the OS through the Applications.
For the developer, an obvious benefit with IaaS is that it frees the developer from many concerns when provisioning physical or virtual machines.
This was one of the earliest and primary use cases for Amazon Web Services Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2).
Developers were able to readily provision virtual machines (AMIs) on EC2, develop and test solutions and, often, run the results ‘in production’.
The only requirement was a credit card to pay for the services.
PaaS
With Platform as a Service, everything from the network connectivity through the runtime is provided and managed by the platform vendor.
The Windows Azure best fits in this category today.
In fact because we don’t provide access to the underlying virtualization or operating system today, we’re often referred to as not providing IaaS.
PaaS offerings further reduce the developer burden by additionally supporting the platform runtime and related application services.
With PaaS, the developer can, almost immediately, begin creating the business logic for an application.
Potentially, the increases in productivity are considerable and, because the hardware and operational aspects of the cloud platform are also managed by the cloud platform provider, applications can quickly be taken from an idea to reality very quickly.
SaaS
Finally, with SaaS, a vendor provides the application and abstracts you from all of the underlying components.
Cloud Services
“Cloud Services” are used in Azure to “group” instances together. Cloud Services have features such as end-points, load balancing and auto-scale. For SharePoint and SQL don’t even think about auto-scale though.
Availability Sets
Availability sets are a logical construct that allows you to specify a group of instances/roles. Whenever Microsoft must reboot one of your VMs for maintenance or other purposes, they will respect the Availability Sets and make sure that only one of the machines within an Availability Set are down at a time. For instance grouping all SharePoint Web Servers into one Availability Set, makes sense.