Three Fault Domains in Azure while in Resource Manager Deployment Model

March 16, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Three Fault Domains In Azure Now Default When Using Resource Manager Deployment Model

Lo and behold, I was extremely happy to see a change – Three Fault Domains! After being away from Azure for a month or two this summer I decided fire up the Azure Portal. I wanted to see what changes have been implemented recently as I prepare for my PASS presentation on Azure SQL Server high availability. They have finally started offering Three Fault Domains per Availability Set as the default setting. Choose “Resource Manager” as your deployment model instead of “Classic”.

Up until now when you created an Availability Set, the default option was to create two Fault Domains per Availability Set. When deploying a cluster, it is important to have a minimum of three Fault Domains. One for each cluster node and one for your File Share Witness. This ensures that a failure of a single fault domain never impacts more than one of your quorum votes at any given time. Before this feature was implemented in the GUI, there was a way to do it through an ARM Template. But putting it in the GUI makes it easy for those administrators not quite up to speed on ARM templates.

This feature now completes the steps I documented earlier on how to create a SQL Server FCI in Azure.

Three Fault Domains In Azure Now Default When Using Resource Manager Deployment Model

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2015/09/08/three-fault-domains-in-azure-now-default-when-using-resource-manager-deployment-model/

Azure Cloud Reaches Canada

March 13, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Azure Cloud Reaches Canada

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/

New Azure Announcements: Azure Disaster Recovery And Very Large VMs

March 11, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

New Azure Announcements: Azure Disaster Recovery And Very Large VMs

Azure continues to improve their services. Just in the past week they have announced their new “G-Series” VMs, some of the most powerful VMs offered by any cloud provide. Check out the details here…

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/08/largest-vm-in-the-cloud/

Also, if you have been considering using Azure Disaster Recovery as I describe here, you will be happy to know that you can get a 6 month trial of ExpressRoute for FREE! ExpressRoute will help you connect your on-premise datacenter into Azure with a fast secure connection. Check out the announcement here…

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/12/azure-data-center-migration-just-got-easier/

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2015/01/15/new-azure-announcements-azure-for-disaster-recovery-and-very-large-vms-azure/

Static IP In Azure Now Available

February 21, 2018 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Reserve Your Static IP in Azure

You now can reserve a static public IP for your cloud service in Azure. Usually, your static IP would release when you stopped all VMs in your cloud service. This way, you would be issued a new one the next time you started your VMs. You had to keep at least one VM running in each cloud service all the time, probably for the demos to work properly without a bunch of rework each time.

The Best Bit? It’s Free!

And even better news, the 1^st five static IP addresses you reserve are FREE. Now I can turn off all of my VMs and sleep easy at night knowing that my addresses won’t change, breaking my SQL Server Failover Cluster demo. Most of all, I can be sure that I won’t exceed my $200 MSDN Azure credit, which is always a good thing.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn690120.aspx

Reproduced with permission from https://clusteringformeremortals.com/2014/06/19/static-ip-in-azure-now-available/