31 Days of Servers in the Cloud – Servers Talking in the Cloud (Part 4 of 31)

Setting up your trial account in Windows Azure can be very easy to do.  If you have not yet, you can visit https://aka.ms/GetAzureIaaS to get started.  In part 2 and part 3 Tommy showed you how easy it is to get rolling in the cloud with your virtual systems from getting your Virtual Machines started to choosing the right OS.  However, what if you wanted to get your servers to talk to each other.  For example what if you wanted to setup two web servers to load balance an SQL server database and an application?  This is actually fairly easy to achieve in Windows Azure.  You just need to have a plan on how you want your servers to connect.  Then it is matter of creating your servers.  Windows Azure will help you create the rest as you go through the process.

After you create your first server in Windows Azure you will then be able to quickly add other servers and get them connected.  You will go through the creation of the virtual machine just like any other virtual machine with the exception in step 3. In the VM Mode page, select Connect to existing Virtual Machine and choose the VM you want the servers to connect to from the drop down list. This will connect the new virtual machine to your previously created virtual machines and configure the cloud service for you. This allows the virtual machines to be on the same network.

For every virtual machine you want to have connected to each other you will simply follow the same procedure just adding the virtual machines to your existing cloud service. 

One last word is with Windows Azure virtual machines you can also take advantage of load balancing your servers.  Configuring this is also easy to do.  All you need to do is configure the endpoint for the servers to be load-balanced.    Think of an endpoint as simply a network connection point to the server, for example a common endpoint would be port 80 if your configuring web servers.  Endpoints will be covered in more detail in an upcoming part of the series, but I wanted to let you know it is a built-in feature you can easily take advantage of.  When you go to add an endpoint to a server, all you will need to do is simply check the load-balance radio button and choose your endpoint, and Windows Azure will take care of the rest.  Very cool function!

 

We hope you enjoy the series and make sure you give Windows Azure a Try: https://aka.ms/GetAzureIaaS

If you missed any of the parts you can find the rest of the series here: 31 Days of Servers in the Cloud.