Virtual Machines in a Scale Set provide a great way to spin up many identical machines in parralell. Thes VMs are all based on a common VM image and so unless all you need on your VMs is Windows, you are going to need to load applicaitons and data into these VMs. Getting your applications into that image can be done one of two ways:
Use a Gallery image for your scale set and apply your applications on each VM when it is deployed using something like the PowerShell DSC extension, or Chef/Puppet etc.
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.
In an ideal world, all our cloud applications would be designed from the ground up to work with the cloud, they would be designed to work with cloud principals, make use of PaaS services and provide high availability. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. We are regularly tasked with moving existing on-premises applications into the cloud as a “lift and shift” type operation, until they can be redesigned to be cloud native.
Earlier last week Microsoft announced the public preview of the VM Instance Metadata service. This service allows you to query information about a VM, from inside the VM itself, it’s something that has been available on AWS for a long time and has some really interesting uses for users or code running inside your virtual machines. In this post we’ll dig a bit deeper into the service and how it can be used.
I’ve seen quite a few forum posts of late asking something along the lines of “Why can’t I create A series VM’s any more” so I thought it worth a quick post to detail what’s up and how to fix it.
The problem here is that if you use the Azure portal to create a VM and use the defaults provided, when you come to selecting a VM your presented with a Window like this:
In the second part of this series we look at Virtual Machine and other associated IaaS components and how these translate from AWS to Azure. As with the previous article, the intent here is to provide a high level overview of the service and relate it to it’s AWS counterpart so those of you that are coming to Azure from AWS know where to start looking for the services you need and the documentation to help you get started.
At this weeks Ignite conference we’ve seen a number of new VM sizes either be announced or hinted at during the sessions. Here’s a quick update on the new machine types:
H Series Designed for High Performance Computing (HPC), the H series VM’s are available in public preview in the South Central US region today and will be rolled out to other regions soon. The H series contain the fastest processers of all Azure VM SKU’s as well having Infiniband networking.
