Windows Azure

Cross-Post: Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Microsoft Dynamics GP on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services!

Craig_Kitterman — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Windows Azure Infrastructure Services - Virtual Machines and Virtual Network - provide on-demand infrastructure that scales and adapts to your changing business needs. Whether you are creating new applications or running existing applications in Virtual Machines, we provide the best cloud economics through per-minute billing with no minimum usage requirements. A great example of an existing workload benefitting from cloud scale and economics is Dynamics. Microsoft Dynamics team has today announced a new way for customers to consume Dynamics GP 2013 and Dynamics NAV 2013. Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 are now available hosted in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, offered and serviced through the Dynamics partner ecosystem.

You can read more at the Dynamics team's blog and find about early adapter customers and partners.

Windows Azure Service Bus Drives High Availability, Scalability for Financial Services Portal

Amy_Frampton — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 13:00:00 GMT

Mortgage companies and appraisal management companies face fast, complex, data-heavy business processes. To manage all the documents and data surrounding the processing of appraisal orders, as well as automating the processes themselves, they need enterprise-class, fast, easy-to-setup, scalable services with virtually unlimited capacity.

It sounds like a job for a cloud computing platform.

Anil Balakrishnan thought so, too. Balakrishnan is Vice President of Product Solutions at Schakra Inc., a solution provider whose clients include Microsoft and Vodafone. To create such a solution for an appraisal management company, Schakra teamed with Bradford Technologies and Nasoft. The result is a Unified Collateral Data Portal (UCDP™) submission service, called PortalDirect™, which Balakrishnan says is the first of its kind.

When they created the service, Balakrishnan and his colleagues had a choice of cloud-computing platforms and they considered their choice carefully, including Amazon SQS with SNS, SimpleDB, and S3. But they chose Windows Azure.

“The driving factors for us to use Windows Azure were the familiar developer experience and the community support,” he says. “Furthermore, our extensive knowledge and experience in the .NET Framework and other Microsoft technologies made it easier for us to work with Windows Azure and its platform services, and to overcome development challenges without needing custom solutions.”

Mortgage lenders and other users access PortalDirect to submit their appraisal orders, which are processed through a multi-step workflow integrated with third-party services. To coordinate those services within the workflow, the developers chose a message-oriented architecture. Each service exchanges messages with PortalDirect to communicate the action that each participant has to take to advance the workflow. This messaging-based architecture lends itself to a stateless system that enables massive scale across identical nodes without the need to maintain a node-workflow affinity.

In designing PortalDirect, the developers kept three needs top-of-mind:

Scalability, as measured by system throughput.
Reliability and availability, to support the business needs of the financial services users.
Fault tolerance, defined as the ability to recover gracefully and without data loss from the inevitable transient failures that occur in workflows with many components and services.

The developers used Windows Azure—and, in particular, Windows Azure Service Bus—to help meet these needs. The Service Bus offers out-of-the-box features to implement a message-based asynchronous and stateless workflow. This is the key architectural element of the solution and is served by Service Bus topics and queues. The developers used Service Bus topics, for example, to implement a publish/subscribe architecture. They used queue-based messaging to load-balance system components efficiently and to protect the workflow from transient failures in those components. That helps meet the needs for scalability, reliability, and fault tolerance.

According to Balakrishnan, the Service Bus was an easy choice, as well as an effective one, in part because of its API. “The API is designed to be easy to use and, for the most part, self-explanatory,” he says. “It offers a good choice of client libraries/techniques that we used for all sorts of scenarios, such as .NET client libraries and examples to create our own WCF/REST clients. The documentation—for example, MSDN articles on performance tuning and best practices—helped us to build a world-class system.”

Schakra began to roll out the PortalDirect service to its customers in August 2011 and says the system has functioned effortlessly ever since. The PortalDirect has processed more than 110,000 appraisals to date and supports, on average, more than 1,800 transactions per business day.

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #68)

Mark_BrownMS — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:55:00 GMT

Welcome to the newest edition of our weekly roundup of the latest community-driven news, content and conversations about cloud computing and Windows Azure.

Here is what we pulled together for the past week based on your feedback:

Articles, Videos and Blog Posts

Setting an Endpoint ACL on a Windows Azure VM (posted June 8)
Tips and Tricks of Developing on Windows Azure China (posted June 10)
Windows Azure BizTalk Services – getting started (posted June 3)
Windows Azure Bridges & Message Itineraries: an architectural insight (posted June 3)
Walkthrough of New Windows Azure BizTalk Services (posted June 3)
Using PowerShell to move files to Azure Storage (posted June 3)
Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines (posted June 3)
Windows Azure Mobile Services "Rent a Home" Sample, Part 4: Push Notifications (posted June 2)
Using Amazon Login (and LinkedIn and …) with Windows Azure Access Control (posted May 31)

Upcoming Events and User Group Meetings

North America

October - June, 2013: Windows Azure Developer Camp – Various (50+ cities)

Europe

June 18, 2013: Scott Klein – All things Azure – Manchester, UK
June 19, 2013: High Availability and Disaster Recovery in a SQL VM – London, England
June 20, 2013: Community Day 2013 – Mechelen, Belgium
June 22 & 23, 2013: Windows Phone Coding Camp -- Hamburg, Germany ‎

Rest of World/Virtual

June 19, 2013: Windows Azure BizTalk Services and Fiddler Deep Dive—Brisbane, Australia

Interesting Recent Windows Azure Discussions on Stack Overflow

Azure ACS Set Up in C# – 1 answer, 1 vote
Can't create Azure VMs from an uploaded Windows 8 VHD – 1 answer, 1 vote
Could not load file or assembly Microsoft.Data.OData Version=5.2.0.0 error in Azure Cloud Worker Role using Table Storage – 1 answer, 0 votes
Setting the Azure Trace logging switch - why in 2 places and not 1? – 2 answers, 0 votes

Mark

50 Percent of Fortune 500 Using Windows Azure

StevenMartinMS — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:28:00 GMT

Last week at TechEd North America, I had the opportunity to meet with a staggering number of customers, partners and analysts from all over the world. There is nothing as energizing as hearing directly from customers like Milliman, Trek and Mando Group who are using Windows Azure to forge new ground. As I mentioned during an event, I’ve had the privilege of working on a number of high-growth businesses at Microsoft and in the Valley during explosive growth of the ‘90s. That said, I haven’t seen anything that compares the growth we are seeing in Cloud Computing.

Gartner recently predicted that the public cloud services market will grow 18.5% in 2013, which would be impressive for any ordinary business but is significantly lower than what we estimate given the traction we are seeing. In just a year, we have grown to over 200 services for our platform, more than doubled our customer base (now at 250,000) and are seeing an average of 1,000 new customers per day. In fact, more than 50% of the Fortune 500 are using Windows Azure already. The growth doesn’t stop with customer volume— we continue to double compute and storage capacity every six to nine months and are simultaneously expanding into Japan, Australia and China (operated by 21Vianet).

This growth tells the story of Windows Azure’s durability, staying power, and value across the globe. But so does the increase in usage. With over four trillion objects in Windows Azure and an average of 270,000 requests per second, customer requirements grow and are met daily. In peak periods, demand can grow to a staggering 880,000 requests per second.

To say we’re humbled and even amazed by Azure’s momentum would be an understatement. Why is Azure growing so fast? Simply put, we’re delivering what customers are asking for—choice and end-to-end support. We understand the diversity of cloud adoption and the requirements customers have for Hybrid application patterns and deployment scenarios. We also know that customers expect support for the entire stack, not just the infrastructure or the application.

Momentum is a good indicator of where we’ve been, and where we’re going. To that end, I’d like to invite you to see for yourself what we have been up to and take advantage of our free trial.

Steven Martin
General Manager
Windows Azure

Mobile Services updates and Android support for Notification Hubs

Miranda_Luna — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 08:00:00 GMT

This week, we’re unveiling updates that make Mobile Services a more robust and flexible backend for mobile apps, a free 20MB SQL database to be used with Mobile Services or Web Sites, and support for sending push notifications to Android devices through GCM in Notification Hubs.

Mobile Services

Mobile Services makes it fast and easy to build dynamic and engaging mobile apps that scale. Today, we’re expanding its capabilities by adding support for Custom API and source control via local Git.

Custom API

Since the initial preview launch, Mobile Services has enabled developers to add custom logic to Insert, Read, Update, and Delete operations on their SQL database tables through server scripts. One of the most popular feature requests on our uservoice page has been for Custom API endpoints that allow developers to write server-side scripts that aren’t associated with a SQL database table.

In this week's release, we’ve not only done that, but also given developers additional control over the HTTP request and response so that they can receive types other than JSON and then detect and append their own HTTP headers.

The Windows Azure portal now contains an ‘API’ tab.

If you click API - Create a Custom API, you’ll find that you’re able to set permissions in a very similar fashion to how you would on your Mobile Services SQL database tables.

From there, you’ll be able to write scripts that leverage the Express.js API. With Custom API, you can send XML (which enables Windows Periodic Notifications), handle different HTTP methods from the same script (such as a GET and POST), perform some advanced routing, share code between Custom API scripts and more.

Source Control via Local Git

Another pressing customer request was for integrated source control to enable continuous integration. Today, we are releasing local Git support, which not only enables continuous integration, but also allows you to install your own node modules.

You can connect a local Git repository to you Mobile Service on the main dashboard and clicking ‘Set up source control.'

Once you click 'Set up source control,' you’ll be prompted to provide the credentials for your repo.

After you’ve done so, you’ll find a git URL on the ‘Configure’ tab that you can use to clone the repository locally.

The repository will contain a folder for your Mobile Service with subfolders for your Custom API scripts, table scripts and scheduled scripts. When you add a new script to your local repository then run git push from the command line, you’ll see those scripts appear in the portal.

Importantly, with source control, you can not only push updates to your Mobile Service, but also install your own node modules. Once you set up a local Git repository, npm install your own node modules into the repo. Then just run a git push and you’ll be able to use these modules from Custom API scripts with a standard node.js require.

Stable NuGet Package

When we introduced a new version of the Mobile Services C# client libraries based on portable class libraries (PCL), we enabled a number of new scenarios:

Portable libraries that consolidate our Windows Store and Windows Phone 8 libraries on a single codebase. That consolidation allows developers to use Mobile Services with a variety of C# clients and call Mobile Services from an ASP.NET or .NET server backend.
Turnkey Mobile Services functionality for Windows Phone 7.x
Support for enum types that are automatically serialized into strings by the client, nullable types, contains queries on lists, a new MobileServicesCollection, HttpMessageHandlers, and improved unit-testing.

With the latest update shipped yesterday, this package moves out of pre-release. To install, simply run this command in the Package Manager Console.

Free 20 MB SQL Database

We know that customers developing mobile and web apps need to store relational data in the cloud. We also understand that, during development and testing, it’s helpful to have a free data option. That’s why we’re happy to announce that every Windows Azure subscription will receive a free 20-MB Windows Azure SQL Database for 12 months that can be used with Windows Azure Mobile Services or Web Sites.

Get Started

When you create a new Mobile Service or Web Site, you’ll find the option to a create a New Free 20 MB Windows Azure SQL Database in the database dropdown. (When you create a new Mobile Service, this will be automatic; when you create a new Web Site, you’ll need to choose ‘Custom Create.’)

If you select that option, you’ll be able to enjoy the free 20-MB SQL database for as long as your data needs do not exceed 20 MB.

You receive one free 20-MB SQL database per Windows Azure subscription, to be used with Mobile Services or Web Sites. Multiple Mobile Services or Web Sites can be associated with the same free 20-MB SQL database. If your data needs exceed 20 MB, lift the cap on the ‘SCALE’ tab and published rates will apply. The free 20-MB of SQL is only for new databases and is not a credit for existing databases.

Notification Hubs

Notification Hubs lets you broadcast push notifications to millions of devices across platforms from almost any backend hosted in Windows Azure. Notification Hubs are a great way to modernize existing apps hosted in Virtual Machines, Cloud Services or Web Sites by engaging users through push notifications; it’s also a great way to enrich the push notifications support available through Mobile Services by subscribing different subsets of users to different topics.

Today, in conjunction with Microsoft Open Technologies, we’re excited to add support for Android push notifications via Google Cloud Messaging (GCM) to the suite of supported platforms. With this release, developers can now broadcast push notifications to Windows Store, iOS and Android devices via WNS, APNS, and GCM, respectively.

Get Started

To get started broadcasting push notifications to Android devices, you’ll need the Service Bus .NET Preview SDK, the Android SDK, and the Android Notification Hubs SDK.

Once you create a Google API project and generate an API key on the Google APIs Console page, note the number after #project in your project URL. That is your GCM sender Id.
After obtaining the GCM sender Id, head back to the main APIs console page, select Service, set Google Cloud Messaging to ‘On,’ accept the Terms of Service, and then select API Access. At this point, you’ll be prompted to create a new Server Key.
Once you’ve registered with GCM, login to the Windows Azure portal, click App Services - Service Bus - Notification Hub - Quick Create.
Choose a name for your Notification Hub, a region (remember to choose the same region as your application to cut down on latency), and a namespace.
In the Service Bus tab in the left nav, you’ll see the namespace for you Notification Hub. After you click on that namespace, hit the Configure tab and copy in your GCM API Key. Don’t forget to save.
Before you leave the portal, copy down the connection string with listen access from the main Dashboard under Connection Information.
Next, you connect you Android application to the Notification Hub by going to the MainActivity class and adding the following private members (of course replace the sender Id the one you obtained above):
After that, you’ll just update the OnCreate method and MainActivity.java file with your credentials and stand up a receiver that displays push notifications. You can find all the details here.

Summary

You can start building Mobile Services powered applications that leverage Custom API and local Git for source control today. You can also add Android broadcast push support to any app built on Windows Azure with Notification Hubs.

Visit the Mobile Developer Center and MSDN for more information regarding Mobile Services and Notification Hubs, respectively. Visit Scott Guthrie’s blog post for additional information regarding this release.

As always, the team is eager to hear what you’d like to see next. Let me know @MLunes90.

Miranda

Introducing Multi-Factor Authentication on Windows Azure

Craig_Kitterman — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 17:00:00 GMT

Editor's Note: This post comes from Sarah Fender -- Director, Windows Azure.

Over the last few months we’ve been sharing more insight into what’s in it for the enterprise when it comes to using Windows Azure. Today we’re announcing a new service code named Active Authentication, which will allow enterprises to secure employee, partner, and customer access to cloud applications with multi-factor authentication.

Starting today, companies can enable multi-factor authentication for Windows Azure Active Directory identities to help secure access to Office 365, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, Dynamics CRM Online and many other apps that are integrated with Windows Azure AD. Developers can also use the Active Authentication SDK to build multi-factor authentication into their custom applications and directories.

Active Authentication works by adding an extra step to the sign in process. After a user enters their username and password, they are required to also authenticate with the Active Authentication app on their mobile device or via an automated phone call or text message. This helps prevent unauthorized access to data and applications in the cloud – reducing the risk of a breach and enabling regulatory compliance.

Active Authentication, is built on the industry-leading PhoneFactor service which Microsoft acquired last fall. It offers the strong security your company requires, yet is super easy to set up, manage and use. The service offers:

Rapid Set Up: Simply add the service to your Windows Azure AD tenant and turn it on for your users. Or, add the service to your custom applications using just a few lines of code.
Automated Enrollment: Windows Azure AD users enroll their own phone numbers and set authentication preferences during the standard sign in process. There are no tokens to provision and ship, so you can quickly enable the service for users around the globe.
Scalable: The reliable, scalable service supports high-volume, mission critical applications and large-scale employee, partner, and customer deployments.

Flexible billing options allow you to choose the approach that offers the best value based on your planned use. These include:

Per user, per month: Pay by the number of users you enable for multi-factor authentication each month.
Per authentication: Pay by total number of authentications used each month.

During the preview, the price for the active authentication is $1.00 per user per month or $1.00 for every 10 authentications depending. These prices represent a 50% discount off our anticipated prices at GA. For more information see the Pricing page.

For more Technical Information on How to Get started jump over to the Windows Azure Active Directory Blog. Ready to go, Sign up for Free Trial.

Cross-Post: SharePoint on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Craig_Kitterman — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 20:00:00 GMT

(Editor's Note: This post comes from the Data Platform Team.)

SharePoint Farms

Hello everyone:

We want to inform you on a new tutorial. With this tutorial you will learn how to:

Configure, and deploy a SharePoint farm on a set of Virtual Machines in this tutorial.
Create a set of Virtual Machines using images from the gallery including Windows Server 2012, SQL Server 2012, and SharePoint Server 2013.
Create a domain, join machines to the domain, and run the SharePoint configuration wizard.
How to enable the SQL Server AlwaysOn feature for high availability.

You can find the tutorial here: Installing SharePoint 2013 on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.

For additional guidance, go to SharePoint 2013 on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.

The Top 10 Things to Know When Running SQL Server Workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

Roger_Doherty — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 15:50:00 GMT

When we announced the availability of the Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Virtual Network previews (we call these two sets of services Windows Azure Infrastructure Services) in June 2012, organizations all over the world began testing their Microsoft SQL Server workloads and pushing the preview to its limits. You can do amazing things with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. The ability to rapidly deploy virtual machines (VMs) capable of running many different types of SQL Server workloads at a low cost without having to procure and manage hardware has broad appeal. The ability to do complex multi-VM deployments in a virtual network, support for Active Directory (AD), support for SharePoint, and the ability to connect your virtual network back to on-premises networks or remote machines using virtual private network (VPN) gateways makes it even more interesting as an off-premises hosting environment for IT shops and developers alike. Windows Azure Infrastructure Services is a stepping stone that organizations can use to migrate some of their existing workloads to the cloud, as is with no changes, while at the same time taking advantage of more modern "Platform-as-a-Service" capabilities of Windows Azure in a hybrid fashion. We've seen organizations run everything from simple development and test SQL Server workloads to complex distributed mission critical workloads. Here's a few things we've learned from their experiences.

Know Your SLA:
Before you unplug that server and move your SQL Server workloads to Windows Azure, you need to understand the relevant Service Level Agreements (SLA). The key thing to pay attention to is this statement: "For all Internet facing Virtual Machines that have two or more instances deployed in the same Availability Set, we guarantee you will have external connectivity at least 99.95% of the time." What does this mean from a SQL Server perspective? It means that in order to be covered by this SLA, you will need to deploy more than one VM running SQL Server and add them all to the same Availability Set. See Manage the Availability of Virtual Machines for more details. It also means that you will need to implement a SQL Server High Availability Solution if you want to ensure that your databases are in sync across all of the virtual machines in your Availability Set. The bottom line is that you have to do some work to ensure high availability in the cloud just as you would have to do if these workloads were running on-premises. When properly configured, Availability Sets ensure that your SQL Server workloads will keep running even during maintenance operations like upgrades and hardware refreshes.
Know Your Support Policy:
The beautiful thing about running SQL Server in a Windows Azure Virtual Machines is that it's very much like running SQL Server anywhere else. It just works. You don't have to change your applications or worry whether various SQL Server features are supported. Most SQL Server features are fully supported when running on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services with a few important exceptions. Let's start with SQL Server version support. Microsoft provides technical support for SQL Server 2008 and later versions on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. If you are still running workloads on SQL Server 2005 or earlier, you will need to upgrade to a newer version in order to get support. If you are going to upgrade, we suggest you upgrade to SQL Server 2012. It was designed to be "cloud ready" with native support for Windows Azure in the management tools, development tools and the underlying database engine.

First, let's talk about high availability. If you don't think you need to worry about implementing a high availability solution for your SQL Server deployments in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, think again. As mentioned in the previous section, you will need to implement some kind of database redundancy in a virtual machine Availability Set in order to be covered by our SLA. However, there are some limitations that affect SQL Server high availability features. First of all, SQL Server Failover Clustering is not supported. Don't panic, there are plenty of other options if you want to deploy SQL Server in a high availability configuration, such as AlwaysOn Availability Groups, or by using legacy features like Database Mirroring or Log Shipping. We recommend you use the AlwaysOn Availability Groups feature in SQL Server 2012 for high availability, but there are some considerations you should be aware of if you go this route. Availability Group Listeners are not currently supported, but stay tuned as we plan to add support for this in the near future. If you can't wait for Listener support and you still want to use AlwaysOn Availability Groups, there is a work-around. You can use the FailoverPartner connection string attribute instead. You should be aware that this approach limits you to two replicas in your AlwaysOn Availability Group (one primary and one secondary), and does not support the concept of a readable secondary. See Connect Clients to a Database Mirroring Session for more information.

Next, let's talk about some important considerations that apply when configuring storage for your SQL Server databases. In general, we recommend you attach a single data disk to your VM and use it to store all of your data and log files. If you decide to spread your data and log files across multiple data disks to get more storage capacity or better performance, you should not enable geo-replication. Geo-replication cannot be used with multiple disks configurations, because consistent write order across multiple disks is not guaranteed.

The final aspect we will cover is the various "distributed" features that SQL Server supports such as Replication, Service Broker, distributed transactions, distributed queries, linked servers, etc. All of these things should work just fine across SQL Server VMs deployed in the same virtual network, but once you start crossing that boundary (either across the public internet or a virtual network VPN gateway), you had better test them thoroughly. These features were designed for use in on-premises data centers, LANs and WANs, not across the public internet.

Take some time to read the Support policy for Microsoft SQL Server products that are running in a hardware virtualization environment for more specifics.
Know Your Licensing:
The first (and easiest) way to license your SQL Server deployment on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services is to create a new virtual machine using one of our pre-built SQL Server platform images in the Image Gallery. Using this approach you pay an hourly rate depending upon the edition of SQL Server you choose (Enterprise, Standard or Web). There's no need to worry about product keys, activation, etc. and you can get access to your newly provisioned SQL Server VM in minutes. Be aware that you are charged per minute and there are no minimums. See Provisioning a SQL Server Virtual Machine on Windows Azure for more information. Microsoft doesn't look inside your VMs, so if you de-install SQL Server from a VM that was provisioned using a platform image you will still get charged for SQL Server usage unless you dispose of the VM.

The second option is to "bring your own VM". This involves building your own Hyper-V VMs on-premises, installing SQL Server on them, then uploading them to Windows Azure. See Creating and Uploading a Virtual Hard Disk that Contains the Windows Server Operating System for guidance on how to do this. When you bring your own VM, the cost of the Windows Server operating system license is built into your hourly compute charges, but this is not the case for other server products like SQL Server, and it's up to you to make sure that your VMs comply with Microsoft licensing policies. By default, server products like SQL Server are not licensed to run in virtualized configurations or in a hosting environment like Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Microsoft offers different SQL Server licensing options for this scenario depending upon whether you are running production workloads or development / test workloads.

For running production SQL Server workloads, you must purchase software maintenance. See Microsoft License Mobility through Software Assurance for more details. From a licensing standpoint, you will need the same SQL Server edition and number of licenses that you needed on-premises. For instance, if you use SQL Server Standard or Enterprise Edition core-based licenses on-premises, with Software Assurance you can move those core licenses to Windows Azure. A minimum of four core licenses per Virtual Machine applies, so pick an appropriate sized virtual machine. Please note that you will have to wait for 90 days if you choose to reassign your license back to a server on-premises. For running development / test SQL Server workloads, you should consider purchasing an MSDN Pro, Premium or Ultimate Subscription. You can install much of the software included with your MSDN subscription (including SQL Server) on your VMs at no additional cost. See Windows Azure Benefit for MSDN Subscribers for more information.

If you do decide to create your own SQL Server VMs, you should be aware of some recent improvements we announced in a cumulative update to SQL Server 2012 SP1 that greatly simplify the preparation of SQL Server VM images using the SysPrep utility. See Expanded SysPrep Support in SQL Server 2012 SP1 CU2 for more information.

For SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group deployments, please be aware that the "free passive failover instance" licensing benefit does not apply for SQL Server deployments running in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (or any other hosting environment). This benefit only applies to on-premises deployments, i.e. deployments that do not involve a shared hosting environment. That means all of your replicas will require a fully licensed copy of SQL Server Enterprise Edition. If you want to get up to speed on all of these details, check out the SQL Server 2012 Licensing Guide.
Know Your Hardware and Storage:
In this section we will examine the performance characteristics of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services from a CPU, RAM, I/O and network standpoint. Microsoft is committed to providing great compute and storage performance at a very competitive cost in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (see Virtual Machine Pricing Details for more information). But you have to understand that the core value proposition of the cloud is to scale out using shared, low cost compute and storage infrastructure, not to scale up on expensive dedicated big iron. Many large organizations have already virtualized some or all of their SQL Server workloads in their own private clouds, yet some hard-core SQL Server stalwarts remain skeptical about performance and reliability. Just for the record, SQL Server virtualization is fully supported and is here to stay. Having said that, you cannot expect to achieve the same level of performance using a VM that is possible when scaling up on big expensive servers and storage subsystems.

Windows Azure Virtual Machines are hosted on commodity servers in shared clusters, and Windows Azure Disks (OS and data disks) are implemented using Windows Azure Storage which is a shared storage service with built in redundancy. From a CPU perspective, you pay a price for virtualization. From an IO perspective, you pay a price for shared redundant storage. So before you fork lift that highly tuned mission critical SQL Server OLTP workload to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, you should do your homework on performance, throughput and latency. If you plan and test thoroughly, the vast majority of typical SQL Server workloads will run just fine in Windows Azure Virtual Machine. But there are a small percentage of performance sensitive "scale-up" workloads that will never be a good fit for this kind of environment.

Let's start with CPU. The clock speed and other characteristics of our virtual cores may vary somewhat depending upon what kind of host server you land on. You should use at least a medium sized VM instance (A2) because SQL Server needs approximately 4GB of RAM to breathe. A2 and larger VM's offer dedicated virtual cores, so you won't have to share your virtual cores with other VMs on the same host. Depending upon the VM size you choose, you can get anywhere from two virtual cores (A2) to eight virtual cores (extra-large A4 VMs and larger).

Next let's look at RAM. Read intensive SQL Server and Analysis Services workloads on big data sets often require lots of RAM to cache all that data in memory for optimal performance. If you see your SQL Server cache hit ratio trending downwards, you might want to move to a larger VM size to get more RAM. You can get anywhere from 3.5 GB RAM in a medium (A2) VM, to 56 GB RAM in a high memory A7 VM. In order to control costs, you should be conservative when sizing VMs. Test your workloads on smaller sized VM's and see if the performance is acceptable. You can always upgrade to a larger VM size later if necessary.

Next let's examine storage performance. As we mentioned before, your VHDs (both OS and data disks) are implemented using Windows Azure Disks, which are a special type of Windows Azure Storage page blob that are cached locally on the host server in a shared disk subsystem. Local redundancy is built in, and geo-redundancy is an additional option. The page blobs backing your locally cached VHDs are stored remotely in a shared storage service that is accessed via REST API's over high-speed interconnects. Check out Data Series: Exploring Windows Azure Drives, Disks and Images for more information. By now you should be realizing that the performance characteristics, configuration and behavior of Windows Azure Disks are quite different from locally attached storage or even SANs.

So what about storage capacity? First of all, do not store your databases on the OS drive unless they are very small. Do not use the D: temporary drive for databases (including tempdb), data stored on this drive could be lost after a restart and the temporary drive does not provide predictable performance. We recommend you attach a single data disk to your VM and use it to store all of your user databases. See How to Attach a Data Disk to a Virtual Machine for more information. A data disk can be up to 1 TB in size, and you can have a maximum of 16 drives on an A4 or larger VM. If your database is larger than 1 TB, you can use SQL Server file groups to spread your database across multiple data disks. Alternatively, you can combine multiple data disks into a single large volume using Storage Spaces in Windows Server 2012. Storage Spaces are better than legacy OS striping technologies because they work well with the append-only nature of Windows Azure Storage. As discussed previously in section 2, do not enable geo-replication if you intend to use multiple data disks. Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) tends to be the key metric used to measure disk performance for SQL Server workloads. So how many IOPS can you do on a Windows Azure disk? The answer is that it depends on the size of IOs and access patterns. For a 60/40 read/write ratio workload doing 8 KB IOs, our target is to provide up to 500 IOPS for a single disk. Need to go higher? Add more data disks and spread your database workload across them. When creating or restoring large databases, you should use instant file initialization to speed up performance.

One final point regarding network bandwidth and latency. VMs are allocated a certain amount of network bandwidth based upon size. This allocation can impact the performance of data transfers and backups, so if you plan on moving a lot of data around you should consider using a larger VM size. When connecting to your VMs over a public endpoint or VPN gateway, it's important to remember that your infrastructure is being accessed over the public internet. Your VMs are far away from your physical location and sitting behind sophisticated network infrastructure like load balancers and gateways with advanced security options enabled. This introduces network latency, and requires a different approach for many types of operations that rely on low-latency networks. For example, migrating a large database to the cloud will take much longer, and client applications that were not designed for cloud-style network latency may not behave properly. We'll discuss networking in more detail in the next section.

For more information on VM sizes and options, see Virtual Machine Cloud Service Sizes. See Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines for detailed information on performance best practices.
Plan Your Network First
Windows Azure Infrastructure Services offers a full range of network connectivity options for your VM deployments. You should plan your network configuration first before creating VMs to avoid having to start from scratch if you make a mistake. You can use Remote Desktop to connect to individual VMs from your desktop and administer them. See How to Log on to a Virtual Machine Running Windows Server for more information. If you want to allow connections into your VMs from the public internet, you can open up ports using endpoints. See How to Set Up Communication with a Virtual Machine for more details. If you want to administer your SQL Server remotely over the internet, you can create an endpoint that allows access to your VM over the standard SQL Server port 1433, but since this port is well known to hackers we suggest using a random public port for your SQL Server endpoint. You can automatically load-balance incoming connections to your endpoints across a collection of VMs. See Load Balancing Virtual Machines for more information. This is useful for scenarios like scaling out front-end web servers across multiple VMs.

In order to establish full connectivity between your VMs you should create a Windows Azure Virtual Network first, then create your VMs inside your new virtual network. Your new VMs will be automatically assigned an IP address using ranges specified in your virtual network configuration, there's no need to implement your own DHCP service. Virtual networks come with a built-in DNS, or you can deploy your own DNS server. See Windows Azure Name Resolution for more information. You should thoroughly test your name resolution before continuing. If you don't have a lot of networking expertise, you might want to have a colleague review your configuration before proceeding so you don't back yourself into a corner.

Now things start to get really interesting. You can establish site-to-site connectivity between your corporate network and your virtual network using a secure VPN gateway. You need a VPN device on your corporate network to do this. We support both dedicated VPN devices and software based options when establishing a VPN gateway. See Create a Virtual Network for Cross-Premise Connectivity for more information. You can also establish point-to-site connectivity using a VPN connection directly from your computer to your virtual network which is great for developers or administrators who need to access the virtual network from a remote location. See Configure a Point-To-Site VPN in the Management Portal for more information.

Most Windows Server deployments usually rely on Active Directory (AD) for identity and security. Windows Azure Infrastructure Services supports a full range of Active Directory deployment options. See Install a new Active Directory forest in Windows Azure if you want a stand-alone AD deployment used only by VMs in your virtual network. If you implement a VPN gateway, you can domain-join VM's in your virtual network to your corporate Active Directory. In this scenario it makes sense to deploy a read-only AD domain controller in your virtual network for improved performance and reliability. See Install a Replica Active Directory Domain Controller in Windows Azure Virtual Networks for guidance on how to do this. Many more powerful AD configurations are also supported, such as Active Directory Federation Services and support for hybrid identity scenarios that span your VMs and other cloud services running in Windows Azure. See Windows Azure Active Directory for more information.
Set the Time Zone on Your VMs to UTC
Consider setting the time zone on your VMs to UTC. Windows Azure Infrastructure Services uses UTC in all data centers and regions. Using the UTC time zone may avoid rare daylight savings related timing issues that could crop up in the future. Clients should of course continue using the local time zone.
Use Data and Backup Compression
SQL Server supports Data Compression and Backup Compression features that can help boost I/O performance with minimal CPU overhead. Compressing your data and backups results in faster I/O operations against Windows Azure Storage and your data will take up less space.
Back Up to Blob Storage Instead of Disks
In SQL Server 2012 Service Pack 1 Cumulative Update 2 we enabled a handy new backup scenario for SQL Server deployments in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Instead of having to provision additional data disks to store your backups, you can backup and restore your databases using Windows Azure Blob Storage. Blob storage provides limitless capacity and offers built-in local redundancy and optional geo-redundancy. This frees up precious capacity on your data disks so you can dedicate them to data and log files. See SQL Server Backup and Restore with Windows Azure Blob Storage Service for more information. As an added benefit, you can copy your backup blobs across storage accounts and even regions asynchronously without having to waste precious time and bandwidth performing unnecessary upload and download operations.
Don't Get Hacked
Take the time to properly secure your VMs and SQL Server deployments in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to protect them from unauthorized access. Hackers are always looking to take over poorly secured machines on the Internet and use them for their own purposes. We recommend that you secure your SQL Server deployments in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services the same way you would secure your on-premises SQL Server deployments behind your network DMZ. Avoid opening public endpoints for RDP or TSQL. Instead, set up a secure VPN Gateway and administer your database servers directly. Use Windows Authentication for identity and access control. If you must use SQL Authentication, create a different account for SQL Server administration, add it to the sysadmin role, set up a strong password, then disable the sa account. Minimize your attack surface by stopping and disabling services that you don't intend to use. Consider using SQL Server Transparent Data Encryption (TDE) to protect your data, log and backup files at rest. If these files get copied outside of your VM they will be useless.
Learn PowerShell
The Windows Azure Management Portal offers a rich graphical interface for provisioning and managing your VM deployments in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, but if you have to deploy a lot of virtual machines you should take the time to learn PowerShell. You can save yourself a ton of time and effort by developing a library of PowerShell scripts to provision and configure your VMs and virtual networks. See Automating Windows Azure Infrastructure Services (IaaS) Deployment with PowerShell for more information.

Now that you are armed with some information, we encourage you to jump in and start identifying which of your SQL Server workloads are ready for Windows Azure Infrastructure Services. Start migrating some of your smaller workloads so you can learn and gain confidence, then move on to more intensive workloads. Keep in mind that besides compatibility, Windows Azure Infrastructure Services offers (and requires) granular control over the configuration and maintenance of your SQL Server deployments. This is a selling point for many IT organizations, but others want to get out of the business of maintaining servers so they can focus more on innovation.

Windows Azure SQL Database is built on SQL Server technology and delivered as a service. There's no need to install and manage server software, and advanced features like high availability and disaster recovery are built in. Still others want the best of both worlds by combining the compatibility and granular control offered when running SQL Server on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to migrate existing workloads, combined with the agility and benefits of a managed service in Windows Azure SQL Database for new workloads. This kind of hybrid usage of Windows Azure is fully supported and has become one of the key differentiating factors in comparison with other public cloud providers. See Data Management for more information on all of these capabilities.

Roger Doherty
Sr. Program Manager
Microsoft Customer Advisory Team

Faster development, global scale, unmatched economics… Windows Azure delivers.

Craig Kitterman — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:30:00 GMT

Editor's Note: The following is a post from Scott Woodgate and Karri Alexion-Tiernan, Windows Azure Product Marketing

Over the past few months, you’ve probably heard of us talking about ‘the Power of And’, as we’ve shared a number of ways that Windows Server on-premises and Windows Azure in the cloud can help enterprises take advantage of cloud speed, scale and economics. Today, we’re extending that power through a number of new investments for both developers and IT pros alike.

For our developers, we understand that development and test scenarios are often an organization’s first step in their journey to the cloud. So today, we are excited to share that your MSDN subscription is going to make it easier and faster for you to develop on Windows Azure. Starting today, the new Windows Azure MSDN benefit offers up to $150 per month in credits to use on any Azure service of your choice for development and testing. You can select from a number of preconfigured virtual machines from Microsoft available in the Windows Azure Virtual Machine Image Gallery, images provided by the open source community, or you can upload your own virtual machines with the software included in your MSDN Subscription, except for Windows Client. Better still, when you run your MSDN software using Windows Azure virtual machines, there is no additional cost. You can find additional details on the MSDN benefit here. Speaking of fast, Visual Studio Professional, Premium and Ultimate with MSDN subscribers who activate and use their Windows Azure MSDN benefit before September 30^th, 2013 are also automatically entered into a sweepstakes for a chance to win an Aston Martin V8 Vantage sports car!

While this is great news for developers, we also understand that economics is always top of mind for IT too. Whether you’re a large or small business, the bottom line matters. Previously we mentioned a price reduction on Virtual Machines to ensure that enterprise customers do not feel they need to sacrifice price for performance. Today, we have another economic benefit to share with you. We are changing the way that we charge for our Virtual Machine usage.

Starting today, customers will be charged for usage by the minute rather than by the hour, with no minimum use requirement – which means no more rounding up for our customers; you will now pay only for what you use. If you stop your VM, you don’t pay for the compute. With other cloud providers, you’ll find that you will be charged by the hour, even if you only use five minutes, or you’ll be forced to take a minimum number of minutes that still may be more than your actual usage.

Let’s put this in context. If I use a two core Linux virtual machine with just over 3GB of memory on Windows Azure for 65 minutes, or one hour and five minutes, it would cost $.13, charged to the minute. If I use a similar configuration on an alternative cloud provider I would pay more as they will bill me for a full two hours even though I am only using five minutes of the second hour. Depending on my location choice at the alternate provider, my cost could be as high as $.32 for the equivalent service, a difference of $.19 for that one instance. While this may feel like a small cost delta on a single virtual machine, multiply that by the thousands of virtual machines that you may ultimately run, the difference adds up quickly. Suddenly you may find your cloud economics are not what you thought they would be. We want to ensure our customers have access to all the benefits of the cloud, without price being a barrier.

Although we are changing our billing approach, we aren’t reducing the quality of service we deliver. When using Windows Azure you will continue to receive highly available services with monthly SLAs, along with the scale, support and reliability of our cloud platform that customers such as Jackson Hewitt have come to rely upon. The #2 ranked tax preparer in the United States, Jackson Hewitt is using Windows Azure Infrastructure Services running SQL Server 2012 to meet the computational burst requirements during peak tax season. Their lead application architect recently told us that “it’s an absolute requirement to be able to scale to need and remain highly available” for their customers, but that they trusted Windows Azure to get the job done seamlessly, especially during their busiest peak tax season.

We’re working hard to provide our customers with an optimal hybrid cloud experience, and a key ingredient is ensuring that on-premise resources can connect seamlessly to Windows Azure. To meet our enterprise customers’ diverse hardware configuration needs, we’re also pleased to share that VPN devices from F5, Citrix and WatchGuard are now supported for site-to-site networking, in addition to already supported devices from Cisco and Juniper.

Last but not least, we are also announcing a first to market in public cloud services with a preview of BizTalk Services, a cloud-based B2B integration platform service that provides easy connectivity to on-premises LOB apps and is available exclusively on Windows Azure. With BizTalk Services, developers and IT pros will be able to further the ‘Power of And’ by building, managing and accessing robust hybrid applications that tap into a wide range of enterprise data and systems across a variety of devices. BizTalk Services offers full EDI processing, cloud application integration and hybrid connectivity to on-premises LOB systems. You can find more information here and sign up for the Preview here.

All of our new investments including new global datacenters in China, Australia, and Japan, will help our customers to achieve global scale while continuing to enable both developers and IT Pros to take full advantage of the benefits Windows Azure can provide. We’re on the ground in New Orleans kicking off conference season with TechEd 2013. If you’re in town swing by the Azure booth and say hello, ask a few questions, try out a Windows Azure challenge to win a prize, or get started with a Windows Azure trial today. We hope to see you there!

Scott & Karri

Windows Azure Community News Roundup (Edition #67)

Mark_BrownMS — Fri, 31 May 2013 17:29:00 GMT