SIOS SANless clusters High-availability Machine Learning monitoring
SIOS software offers high availability data protection for leading manufacturer in a user-friendly cloud environment.
“SIOS DataKeeper gave us an easy way to move our business-critical SAP ERP system to the Microsoft Azure cloud while meeting our stringent SLAs for high availability, disaster recovery, and performance,” -Daniele Bovina, Systems Architect, Bonfiglioli.
Great news for my Canadian friends as Azure adoption was inhibited by strict data storage compliance codes. Now with the cloud on Canadian soil, there should be a much easier path to get to Azure.
Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2015/06/02/azure-cloud-reaches-canada/
In part 1 of my series on using Windows Azure as a disaster recovery site, I explained how to create a site-to-site VPN tunnel to Azure Cloud using Windows Server 2012 R2 Routing and Remote Access (RRAS). Now that the two sites are connected, I’m going to walk you through the steps required deploy your first VM in the Windows Azure IaaS Cloud and add it to your on-premise network as a Domain Controller. I will assume you have already done the following:
At this point we are ready to stat. Open the Windows Azure Portal. You should minimally see the Virtual Network the we previously created listed when you select the “All Items” category on the left.
To provision your first VM, click on the “Virtual Machines” in the left hand navigation pane and click “+New” in the bottom left hand corner.
For our purposes, we are going to create a new virtual machine from the gallery.
We will use the Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Image.
Pick your machine size, username and password.
The next step has you create a “Cloud Service”, “Storage Account” and Availability Set. It also asks you where to place the VM. We will choose the Virtual Network that you previously created when you created your site-to-site VPN. We will create a new Cloud Service and Storage Account. The rest of the VMs we will create later will make use of the different accounts we create this first time through.
The final page lists the ports where you can administer this VM, but I’ll show you an easy way to RDP to it in just a moment.
Once the VM is provisioned it should look something like this.
If you click on the VM’s name you will be taking to the VM’s welcome screen where you can learn more about managing the VM
Click on Dashboard, this will give you some detail information about your VM. From here you will be able to click on the Connect button and launch an RDP session to connect to the running VM
Using the username and password you specified when you provisioned the VM, use the RDP session that opens when you click Connect to log in to the provisioned VM. Once connected, you will notice that the VM has a single NIC and it is configured to use DHCP. This is expected and DHCP is required. The VM will maintain the same internal IP address throughout the life of the VM through a DHCP reservation. Static IP addresses are NOT support, even though it may appear to work for a while should you change it to a static IP.
Also notice that if you configured you Virtual Network as I described in part 1 , the DNS server should point to the DC/DNS Server that resides in your onsite network. This will ensure that we are able to add this server to the on-premise domain in the next step.
Assuming your VPN is connected to the Gateway as shown below, you should be able to ping the DNS server on the other side of the VPN.
Ping the DNS server to verify network communication between the Azure Cloud and your on-premise network.
At this point you are able to add this server as a second Domain Controller to your domain, just as you would any other typical domain controller. I’m going to assume you know to add a Domain Controller to an Existing Domain and are familiar with other best practices when it comes to AD design and deployment.
The last step I recommend you update your Azure Virtual Private Network to specify this new DC as the Primary DNS Server and use the other on-premise DC as your secondary domain controller.
Click on Networks, then the name of the Virtual Private Network you want to edit.
Add the new DNS server to the list and click Save
From this point on when you configure servers in this Virtual Private Network, the VMs will be automatically configure with two DNS servers.
In Part 3 of my series on configuring Windows Azure for High Availability and Disaster Recovery, we will look at deploying a highly available SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance in the Windows Azure Cloud using the host based replication solution call DataKeeper Cluster Edition.
Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2014/01/07/extending-your-datacenter-to-the-azure-cloud-azure/
Not long ago I set out to build a multisite SQL Server cluster where one my nodes resides in my local data center and the other node resides in Microsoft’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering, the Windows Azure Cloud. The Azure Cloud has an offering where you can deploy VMs and pay for just the resources you utilize, much like Amazon’s EC2. My goal was to create a proof of concept where I would use the Azure Cloud as an inexpensive disaster recovery site. My configuration is shown in Figure 1.
1. An example of the simple DR configuration I used in my POC
My on premise VMs are used as follows:
For this POC I only deployed on server in the Azure cloud, Azure-DR. Azure-DR is the secondary node in my cluster. If this were an actual production site, I certainly would also want to deploy another domain controller in the Azure cloud to ensure that my Active Directory was available in the DR site. Your actual DR configuration will vary greatly depending upon your needs. I will use the server name depicted in my illustration as I describe the configuration steps below.
For the purpose of this post, I am going to focus on what you need to do to get to the point where you have configured your virtual network in Azure and you create a site to site VPN connection to your primary data center. My next article will discuss the steps required to actually create a multisite cluster for disaster recovery. As with most cloud related services, the interfaces and options tend to change rapidly; the screen shots and directions you see below are relevant as of January 2nd, 2014. Your experience may vary, but these directions should get you pretty darn close. If you encounter difference, please send me a comment and what you did to make it work so other users can benefit from your experience.
I’m not going to walk you through this step-by-step, but essentially you should have a Windows Server 2012 R2 DC configured (VM3-internal) and two additional Windows Server 2012 R2 servers in the domain (VM1-internal and VM2-internal). Each server should use the DC server as their primary DNS server and on VM2-internal and VM3-internal the gateway should be configured to point to VM1-internal, which will eventual be configure with Routing and Remote Access (RRAS). The RRAS (VM1-internal) should be dual homed, with one NIC connected to the internal network and one NIC connected directly to the Public network. Generally this will be the biggest obstacle in deploying this in your lab, as you must have a spare public IP address that you can use for your RRAS server. This configuration will not work if your RRAS server sits behind a NAT’s firewall. It must be directly connected to the internet. The RRAS Server should be configured with just the IP address, subnet mask and DNS server, no gateway should be defined. DO NOT enable Routing and Remote Access, this will be done automatically via a script at a later step.
Log in to the Windows Azure Management Portal and create a new Virtual Network following the steps illustrated below.
CREATE THE GATEWAY
You will need to create the Gateway as soon as the virtual network is created. From the Dashboard of the newly created virtual network, you will be able to produce a Gateway as shown below. Be sure to choose Dynamic Routing because Static Routing with RRAS is not supported in the Azure VPN connection as of April 25th 2013.
Once the gateway is finished creating, you will see your Gateway IP Address and the amount of Data In and Data Out as shown below.
At this point you are ready to configure your on-premise RRAS Server (VM1-internal) to create a site-to-site VPN to the Gateway that you just created. Microsoft has made this very easy, so don’t worry if networking and configuring VPNs are not your specialty. You will just need click on “Download VPN Device Script” and run it on your RRAS server. Microsoft also supports a bunch of Juniper and Cisco VPN routers as well, so if you want to move to a hardware based VPN device in the future you can always come back and download the configuration script specific to your device.
Choose Microsoft Corporation as the Vendor, RRAS as the Platform and Windows Server 2012 as the Operating System and click the checkbox to download the Powershell script. In my case, this same script worked just fine when run on Windows Server 2012 R2.
As of the date of this writing, it seems as if Microsoft has made the script creation process even more intelligent than it was just last month. The script that was created for me was pre-populated with all the information. I did not have to edit anything at all.
At this point, all you need to do is copy the script file on to your RRAS Server (VM1-internal) and save it as a .ps1 and run the PowerShell script. This script will install Routing and Remote Access and configure the Site-to-Site VPN to connect to the Windows Azure Virtual Network you just created. Once you have finished with the RRAS installation go back to the Azure Portal and click Connect to complete the VPN site-to-site connection.
When connected, the Azure Portal should look something like the following.
The final step I had to take to have a usable network was to enable NAT on my RRAS Server. None of my servers could reach the internet without NAT. The basic steps for enabling NAT on RRAS are as follows:
The fun can now begin. In my next post I will walk you through the process of provisioning a Windows VM in Azure and joining it to your on-premise domain.
Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2014/01/03/how-to-create-a-site-to-site-vpn-tunnel-to-the-windows-azure-cloud-using-a-window-server-2012-r2-routing-and-remote-access-rras-server/