Understanding Azure Premium Storage - Part 1

Azure Premium Storage is generally available in April of 2015. Some of you may try that in public preview period. In this part, I'm going to do some introductions for Azure Premium Storage and create a Premium Storage account on Microsoft Azure Portal.

Azure Premium Storage Disks can deliver high-performance, low-latency disk support for I/O intensive workloads running on Azure virtual machines. It can provide maximum 64,000 IOPS per VM but you need to understand the disk bandwidth for VM size. I'm going to talk about Max Disk bandwidth later. Azure Premium Storage Disks are pools of Solid State Disks. At this moment, there are some important thins you need to know.

• Premium Storage Disks are under Premium Storage Accounts only
• Premium Storage is currently available in the Microsoft Azure Preview Portal (new portal), Azure PowerShell 0.8.10 or later, Storage REST APi 2014-02-14 or later and Service Management REST API
• Premium Storage is currently available in the following regions: Southeast Asia, East US 2, West US, West Europe and Japan West (Based on 2, June, 2015)
• Premium Storage supports only Azure page blogs, which are used to hold persistent disk for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs)
• A Premium Storage account is locally redundant (LRS) and keeps three copies of the data with in a single region.
• If you want to use a Premium Storage account for your VM disks, you need to use the DS-series of VMs. You can use both Standard and Premium storage disks with DS-series of VMs but you cannot use Premium Storage disks with non-DS-serise of VMs.
• A premium storage account cannot be mapped to a custom domain name.
• Storage analytics is not currently supported for Premium Storage. To analyse the performance metrics of VMs using disks on Premium Storage accounts, use the operating system based tools, such as Windows Performance Monitor for Windows VMs and IOSTAT for Linux VMs.

Quote from Premium Storage: High-Performance Storage for Azure Virtual Machine Workloads.

First of all, we need to create a new Premium Storage account in the region which you wanted for using Premium Storage Disks.

1. On Microsoft Azure Portal, click "New > Data + Storage > Storage".

2. Next to "Storage account", under "Storage", enter the name for Premium Storage account.

3. Click "Pricing Tier" and then click "View all > Premium Locally Redundant". After that, click "Select".

4. If we needed, we could create a new resource group to assign for dedicated high-performance virtual machines. In my lab, I click "Create" to create a new Premium Storage Account.

It takes few minutes to create the new Premium Storage Account.

In this part, I created the Premium Storage Account. Next Part, I'll create a new Premium Storage Account by PowerShell and create a virtual machine to use Premium Storage disks.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights!

Configuring Cloud Witness on Windows Server 2016 (Technical Preview version)

In Windows Server Technical Preview (vNext), there is a new Failover Cluster quorum option, Cloud Witness. Administrators can configure a cluster to save a quorum to Microsoft Azure. Cloud Witness can apply to many scenarios like Exchange DAG, Multi-Site Cluster and so on. To use cloud witness, there are some requirements.

• Microsoft Azure Account (We need to create a Azure Storage Account under the Microsoft Azure Account)
• Windows Server Technical Preview (This is a new option for Windows Server Technical Preview)
• Make sure the cluster can access Internet (The cloud witness is saved at Microsoft Azure, cluster nodes must connect to Internet)

Lab environment

• Microsoft Azure account
• 1 domain controller is installed Windows Server Technical Preview named DC01
• 4 member servers are installed Windows Server Technical Preview named Node01 to Node 04 and joined tlslab.local domain
• 2 cluster were created and named "Cluster01" and "Cluster02"
• All settings will be performed by Domain Administrator

Goals

Configure Cloud Witness for Cluster01 and Cluster02 by Failover Cluster Manager and Powershell

Steps

1. Log in your Microsoft Azure account on www.azure.com.

2. On Azure Portal, select "Storage".

3. Select your storage account on Microsoft Azure, click "Manage Access Keys".

4. On "Manage Access Keys", copy "STORAGE ACCOUNT NAME" and "PRIMARY ACCESS KEY" by clicking the icon and then paste it to notepad.

5. Click "Tick" icon.

Now, we got the "STORAGE ACCOUNT NAME" and "PRIMARY ACCESS KEY" to access the Azure Storage Account. We can configure the Cloud Witness on "Cluster01" and "Cluster02".

6. On Node01, log in as Domain Administrator.

7. Launch "Failover Cluster Manager".

8. Right-click "Cluster01", select "More Actions > Configure Cluster Quorum Settings".

9. On "Before You Begin" window, click "Next".

10. On "Select Quorum Configuration Option" window, select "Select the quorum witness".

11. Click "Next".

12. On "Select Quorum Witness" window, select "Configure a cloud witness".

13. Click "Next".

14. On "Configure cloud witness" window, next to "Azure storage account name", paste "STORAGE ACCOUNT NAME" of your Azure account from notepad.

15. Next to "Azure storage account key", paste "PRIMARY ACCESS KEY" of your Azure account from notepad.

16. Click "Next".

17. On "Confirmation" window, click "Next".

18. On "Summary" window, click "Finish".

The Cloud Witness has been configured on "Cluster01".

After configuring Cloud Witness, your Azure Storage Account also created "msft-cloud-witness".

19. On Node03, log in as Domain Administrator.

20. Launch "PowerShell" as administrator.

21. Perform Set-ClusterQuorum -Cluster Cluster02 -CloudWitness -AccountName <Azure Storage Account Name> -AccessKey <PRIMARY ACCESS KEY of your Azure account> to configure Cloud Witness for Cluster02.

After configuring Cloud Witness on both clusters, there are 2 records in containers of msft-cloud-witness.

Remark: If you regenerate the "Manage Access Keys" on the Azure Storage Account after configuring Cloud Witness. Make sure you apply a new key on Clusters which are applied the previous key. If the new key isn't applied to Clusters, The status of Cloud Witness changes to "Failed" and you get the event ID 1659 on Cluster Events.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights!

What's happen on the Azure Storage Outage on the 18 of Nov

There was a serious storage outage of Microsoft Azure on 18 of November. Yesterday, Channel 9 uploaded a new video, Inside the Azure Storage Outage of November 18th. Mark Russinovich, Azure Chief Technology Officer, talked and explained about this serious incident of Microsoft Azure Storage.

If you'd like to know the whole story of this incident, please watch it.

This posting is provided “AS IS” with no warranties, and confers no rights!