Storage

Planned failover for Azure Storage is now in preview, but what is it and how does it differ from unplanned failover?

I run a small server at home for storing documents, photos, and media and running some applications that are used at home. This server is running Unraid, which is a Linux Server operating system that allows you to get a level of disk resilience without the need for a full-blown RAID array and multiple redundant disks. It’s a great OS for a home server, and the way it provides resilience using a parity drive has saved me more than once when I had a hardware failure.

The options for hosting SMB shares in Azure have improved in the last year, here’s what’s new for those who need to work with SMB in the cloud.

Managed disks brought a number of benefits to Azure VM’s over thee previous method of manually managing storage accounts used for VM disks. One of these features that is often overlooked or misunderstood is snapshots. In this article we’ll explore what benefits snapshots give you, and how to use them. Before we delve into how to use snapshots, there are some key points to be aware of when using them:

It didn’t make it into todays Ignite Keynote, but today Microsoft released a preview of a new Azure service, Service Endpoints. It is now possible to take Azure services that have previously only had public endpoints, and restrict these to only allow access from a specific virtual network (or multiple networks), or even specific subnets. This preview is starting out with Azure SQL and Storage, with more services to come along soon.

In my last article we discussed the various different options for providing SMB shares in Azure given the lack of shared storage. One of the options we discussed for this was using a new feature of Server 2016 – Storage Replica, and in this article we will take a deep dive into how to setup this up in Azure. This Windows Server feature allows you to replicate data between two servers (or two clusters) and could potentially be a great solution for replicating shares in Azure, if you can cope with the limitations.