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Scaling Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites for High Availability

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Applies To: Windows Azure Pack

To achieve High Availability in your Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites cloud, you can provision additional instances of each Web Sites role. Additional instances of Web Workers, Front Ends, and Publishers can be easily provisioned in the Management Portal for Administrators. Additional Management Servers and a second Web Sites controller can be provisioned through command line and/or PowerShell scripting. In addition, you can take steps to increase the robustness of the SQL Servers in your environment.

For information on adding a second Web Sites controller, see Provision a Second Web Sites Controller. The other topics are discussed here.

Create additional Web Worker, Front End, or Publisher instances (Update Release 6 and later)

To create another Management, Web Worker, Front End or Publisher instance, perform the following steps in the Windows Azure Pack Websites Management Console.

  1. In the left pane of the Management Console, click Web Cloud and then select Managed Servers.

  2. In the Actions pane, click Add server.

  3. Enter the following details to add a new server to the Web Sites Cloud:

    1. Server Name

    2. Select the Role type: Front-End, Management, Publisher or Web Worker.

    3. Mode (only for Web Worker role instances)

    4. Size (only for WEb Worker role instances)

  4. Click OK.

Create additional Management, Web Worker, Front End, or Publisher instances (before Update Release 6)

To create another Web Worker, Front End, or Publisher instance, perform the following steps in the Management Portal for Administrators.

  1. In the left pane of the portal, choose Web Site Clouds.

  2. Select the web site cloud that you want to configure.

  3. Choose Roles.

  4. In the command bar at the bottom of the portal, choose Add Role.

  5. In the Add Server dialog, choose Add New Web Worker, Add New Front End, or Add New Publisher.

  6. In the Setup dialog that follows, provide the hostname or IP address of the server. For a new Web Worker, specify the Worker Type (Shared or Reserved Small/Medium/ Large).

  7. Click the check mark to complete the operation.

Provision Additional Management Servers

To provision an additional Management Server, run the following PowerShell commands on the Controller role. Replace <NewManagementServer> with the name of a newly prepared Windows Server 2012 R2 server or virtual machine.

Import-Module Websites  
  
New-WebSitesServer -Name <NewManagementServer> -ServerType ManagementServer

Configuring SQL Server for High Availability

Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise edition allows you to use AlwaysOn Availability Groups, which reduce the dependency of the database on a single SQL instance. You can use Availability Groups together with Failover Clustering for even greater reliability. For more information on AlwaysOn Availability Groups, see: Configure SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups in Windows Azure Pack. For background information, see Overview of AlwaysOn Availability Groups (SQL Server). For information on Failover Clustering, see Failover Clustering Overview.

See Also

Deploy Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites