Windows Azure Virtual Machines - Common Questions
This blog post is summarizes most common questions Windows Azure Virtual Machine users come across.
1) Capture Versus Snapshot
Capturing a VM creates an image(not meant for backup) that can be used to create multiple VMs based on that same image. You can capture a VM using the Capture option in the portal, the Save-AzureVMImage Azure PowerShell cmdlet, using azure vm capture in the Azure CLI tool, or the Capture Role API.
For VM backups, there is no equivalent to the Hyper-V snapshot feature for Azure VMs. However Azure storage has a blob snapshot feature that allows you to create a backup of the VHD blob in Azure storage. Microsoft does not currently provide a tool for creating blob snapshots, though third-party storage tools such as CloudXplorer include this feature. And you can write custom code to call the Snapshot Blob API to create a blob snapshot.
You can also create a copy of a VHD using Azure storage tools. If the tool uses the 2012-02-12 version or later of the Copy Blob API, it will allow for fast cross-account blob copies, for example to move a VHD between different storage accounts. Most of the commonly used Azure storage tools also allow you to download files to on-premises. This forum post has steps to download the VHD using CloudXplorer. You can use any similar storage tools to perform the same task.
2) How to Secure Windows Azure Virtual Machines
In on-premise environments, security is an critical aspect when building machines, VMs. Building VMs in cloud is no different and one must take important measures to protect the VMs. This blog post summarizes the best practices to be used to protect Windows Azure Virtual Machines
3) How to break the lease on VHDs/blobs?
The Windows Azure platform holds an infinite lease on all the page blobs that it considers disks in your storage account so that you don’t accidently delete the underlying page blob, container, or storage account while the VHD is in use by the VM. If you want to delete the underlying page blob, the container it is within, or the storage account, you will need to detach the disk from the VM first or delete the VM and associated disk object.
In few scenarios, you may end up getting errors while deleting VHDs even though there are no disks/VMs referring to the VHD. In such cases you can manually break the lease using the powershell script. Craig Landis has a detailed forum post describing these errors, workarounds along with the script.
4) Platform updates to VM, restarts, shutdowns.
Windows Azure updates the host OS approximately once in every 1-3 months to keep the environment secure for all applications, virtual machines running on the platform. This update process may result in your VM to restart. You can use availability sets to ensure high availability for your applications running on virtual machines. Managing the high availability is detailed here. Mark Russinovich has posted a great blog post which explains Windows Azure Host updates in detail.
In addition to platform updates, Windows Azure service healing occurs automatically when the Windows Azure detects problematic nodes and moves these VMs to new nodes. When this occurs, you loose connectivity to VM during the service healing process and after the service healing process is completed, when you connect to VM, you will likely to find a event log entry indicating VM restart/shutdown (either gracefully or unexpected)
5) Production workloads and support during Windows Azure Virtual Machines “Preview”.
While some customers have chosen to run production workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines, we currently do not recommend that because the feature is still in preview and meant for testing workloads so that they can be migrated easily to Virtual Machines after the feature is moved to GA(General Availability) status.
Also note that during the preview, support is provided via forums only. Support issues should be posted to one of the following forums:
Windows Azure Virtual Machines for Windows
Windows Azure Virtual Machines for Linux
Windows Azure Virtual Machines Virtual Network
Windows Azure Virtual Machines for SQL Server
Refer to this blog post for other Windows Azure features , available support options.
6) Status of VMs after Windows Azure Virtual Machines reaches General Availability (GA) status
Because the Windows Azure Virtual Machines feature remains in preview, requirements may still change before it reaches general availability. We expect that VMs created during preview will continue to run after GA. Note that it is possible that guest OS requirements could change that may require updating the VM to remain supported.
7) VM role Vs Virtual Machines
We have seen a few customers getting confused between “VM Role”, “Virtual Machines. In fact, few of them applied for “VM Role” access, but really wanted access for Windows Azure Virtual Machines. The confusion arises because of the naming convention and state of the two features
Virtual Machines – is part of IaaS offering (Stateful, Persistent) and currently in preview
VM role – is part of PaaS offering (Stateless, non-persistent) and works just like web role, worker role, but with a custom supplied OS image. This feature is currently in beta.
Below articles give you the overview of both features.
Overview of the Windows Azure VM Role
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg433107.aspx
Virtual Machines
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj156003.aspx
In a nutshell, if you’ve applied for access using old Silverlight portal, you’ve applied for “VM Role”. If you have used account management under new HTML5 portal, you’ve applied for “Virtual Machines”
8) Availability set & affinity groups, Connecting VMs – Three different, distinct purposes
Availability Set is a way to achieve high availability for your virtual machines. An availability set is a group of virtual machines that are deployed across fault domains and update domains. An availability set makes sure that your application is not affected by single points of failure, like the network switch or the power unit of a rack of servers. Guidance for managing availability using availability sets can be found here
Affinity groups are the way to group the services in your Windows Azure subscription that need to work together in order to achieve optimal performance.
When you create an affinity group, it lets Windows Azure know to keep all of the services that belong to your affinity group running at the same data center cluster. For example, if you want to keep the services running your data and your code together, you would specify the same affinity group for those services. That way, when you deploy those services, Windows Azure will locate them in a data center as close to each other as possible. This reduces latency and increases performance, while potentially lowering costs. Importance of affinity groups is described here
Connecting VMs – Load balancing
You group multiple VMs together under a single cloud service to distribute the load to multiple VMs. The way you group is during the second VM creation, you choose “Connect to Existing Virtual Machine” and then select the cloud service under which you wanted to group the VMs. This article details how to load balance virtual machines.
9) GA date?
At the time of publishing this blog there is no public announcement about the GA date. Our teams are working to launch GA at the earliest possible. Stay tuned to Windows Azure Portal for updated information.