I am using Azure VM role. I created a separate VHD (uploaded to page blob) for storing SQL data files (to overcome data persistence issue with VM role). The SharePoint 2010 has been configured on VM. I want to run 2 instances of Azure VM, where I am faining as mounting the data VHD in write mode on 2 instances is not possible. Can anyone help me out in this?
To add to what Joannes said:
A Cloud Drive may be mounted by exactly one writer, but you can make any number of read-only snapshots. This won't help with a scale-out scenario that you're describing, but I just wanted to clarify.
SharePoint 2010 is not a supported configuration in a VM Role currently. There's licensing, compatibility with SQL Azure to consider, scale-out, and potentially other issues. Same goes with installing SQL Server in a VM Role.
Support issues aside, you could look into Azure Connect as a way to reach an on-premise SQL Server instance. This alleviates your need to store SQL Server data files in a Cloud Drive. This will have bandwidth-related performance and cost implications, but it's certainly an option.
CloudDrive is not intended for scaling out. In other words, a blob can be mounted by no more than 1 VM at the same time. This limitation is very unlikely to be lifted in the future, as a single blob is note intended to support scalable writes.
Related
does anybody know a way to perform a periodic remote backup of the full environment (so comprehensive of the application servers and SQL databases) in Jelastic?
I wanted to use Google Drive to store the backups as I was already using it with Plesk.
Thanks.
I am using azure server for sql database.
I want to enabled backup database daily.
And also need to dump sql file for current database and other images uploaded to server.
Any suggestions please?
You can install backup software to your azure server and backup your SQL server to azure cloud storage. There are plenty such software (Duplicati, CloudBerry, Acronis etc).
Some of them have special features to backup SQL server in a proper way, also there are free versions among them.
You can do this in a different ways. You can use the third party applications and schedule backup jobs. Or you can use the native tools and configure everything by your-self. Hope this will be useful for you.
Since you're going down the Azure services route, for the images you had ought to look at Azure Blob Storage
And to back it up...Look at this answer
I know that Cloudberry works with Azure. You can try this software for doing backups daily both full image or icnremental backup.The price is afforable. The tool's simple. I see the person above has already mentioned Cloudberry. Seems to be a good thing.
Currently I am hosting my online application on an Azure VM. This is a pretty standard Umbraco website with around 300 visitors per day, nothing special here.
Details of Azure VM:
- Basic A3
- 4 cores
- 7 GB Memory
In the current situation MsSQL is installed on the VM itself and this is working fine, but I am not a great expert in maintenance. A solution I found is migrating the SQL database to SQL Azure.
Looking at my current website I decided to do this and I migrated the database to SQL Azure:
- S3 Standard
- 100 DTU
- 250GB
After the migration I switched the connection string with the connection string that was provided in the Azure portal. When I reloaded my website the loading time was suddenly three times slower.
For now I switched it back to the local SQL Database, but I am wondering if it is a normal situation that the local SQL is faster then SQL Azure in this case.
I hope someone can answer my question, please let me know if more information is required to answer my question.
Best regards, Martijn
EDIT
The issue is resolved! I found out that the SQL Azure Server that I created was located in a different region then the Azure VM. After I created a new SQL Azure server in the same region the performance issues where fixed.
Good to hear your perf issues are fixed. In general, comparing the performance of a local database versus a PaaS database is not always an apples-to-apples comparison for a number of reasons:
Azure SQL Database is a highly available service (99.99%) that requires synchronous commits to a secondary database. A local database typically is not configured for high availability.
Azure SQL Database provides automatic backup. Depending on your setup, a local database might may or may not be configured for backup.
The affect of network latency on a local database does not exist
The memory and CPU between of a S3 Azure SQL Database and a A3 VM are likely not the same
I'm building a website that will surface data from a third party system. The third party will provide a copy of all the data I need as a SQL restore file (*.bak) inside a rar file on their sftp server. The data changes every day, so my application will need to connect to the sftp site, get the file, unzip it, then restore it into my database server every night. I'm fairly comfortable scripting this in a standard windows environment, but the customer would prefer the application to be built on the MS Azure cloud, which doesn't seem to support a common solution to the problem. It's possible we could abandon Azure, but I'd like to know what the best strategy would be for implementing in Azure if it's possible.
This depends on whether you are trying to use Azure PaaS (cloud service and SQL Azure) or IaaS (VMs). If you are using VMs on Windows Azure, there is going to be no difference between Windows Azure and your familiar Windows environment - so yes, you can do this on Windows Azure.
This can't really be done in Azure cloud services and SQL Azure (SQL Azure cannot restore a .bak file). But your application doesn't seem to be the kind that would run as a cloud service anyway.
Stick to doing it on VMs and it will work as you are familiar with.
We have a DB server with a couple web app db's on there (don't get a ton of traffic). We'd like to make use of the server and allow it to be the DB server for sharepoint. I'm assuming it's not good practice and that sharepoint should have it's own exclusive db server. Am I right in that conclusion, or is it alright if we put the database on a server that already hosts other databases.
You can install SharePoint on an existing DB server, sure. Unless your environment is going to be huge, I don't see why you would give it its own DB server. It will use an embedded SQL Server instance if you want, but you'll get better performance if you have the full-blown version. We're running a few SharePoint apps on our DB server with a number of other applications.
The way in which I solve this is to install a second SQL Server instance dedicated to SharePoint, as SharePoint likes to have a lot of control over the database and spews all sorts of stuff such as logins, etc. across the instance, which you really want to separate from your standard line of business instance.
The added bonus is multiple SQL Server instances on the same physical machine are included in your licence.
Be careful with the SQL Server collation. I think SharePoint requires a particular setting for this. See http://www.moss2007.be/blogs/vandest/archive/2007/07/24/sharepoint-2007-and-sql-server-collation-latin1_general_ci_as_ks_ws.aspx for one reference.
Prior to centralizing our environment we had many Sharepoint sites located on servers with existing applications. I'm not a fan of adding an additional named instance as this increases the administrative overhead for the DBA. You have to know how much use you expect of your Sharepoint instance then measure the resource utilization of your existing applications balance it from there.