Category: Azure

My AidanFinn.Com Blog Has Moved To Microsoft Azure

Tonight I completed the migration of this WordPress blog to Windows Azure.

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I was having performance and health issues with the VM that I was renting from a local hosting company. The admin portal was proving to be a nightmare. I had upgrade the VM but the VM wasn’t upgraded. The hard disk was filling frequently and killing MySQL, and therefore killing the WordPress blog.

Why was I on a VM? Because I needed more processor & bandwidth capacity.

A failure last week led me to look at my options. I’ve grown comfortable with Microsoft Azure so this was the place that I decided to move to. My free €75 credit per month thanks to my MSDN account doesn’t hurt either!

I looked at the website hosting options but they provide too little disk space. The VMs, even the smaller ones, give you loads of disk space. I decided to fire up a cloud service, blob, virtual network and a small VM instance just for my new web server VM. I installed IIS, added the sites, installed PHP, WordPress, MySQL, and a few other bits and bobs and started the laborious process of migrating from the old VM.

I could have cheated but I decided to do a fresh install. It was more time consuming, especially when I had to split the WordPress export file into 40 smaller export files (the import of 2MB files was timing out). I added and configured all the plugins. And then the final steps:

  • After some tests I configured the website to bind to aidanfinn.com and http://www.aidanfinn.com.
  • I changed the DNS A records for those two URLs to switch to the public IP of the Azure cloud service.

My next steps will be:

  • Configure MySQL automated export
  • Deploy Windows Azure Online Backup to backup the IIS Inetpub folder and the MySQL export

And maybe I’ll configure the endpoint monitoring option in the Azure portal Smile

Set A Static IP Address For An Azure VM

Windows Azure (errr Microsoft Azure) has a weird system for assigning IP addresses to VMs in virtual networks. Like VMM, it uses a pool of IP addresses. And that’s where the similarities end. Azure’s method appears to be more like DHCP.

For example:

  • When you log into the guest OS, the VM is configured to use DHCP
  • The address is not reserved like with DHCP. It is possible that a VM could be offline, come back, and get a new IP address.

The latter bit is bad, especially for services such as Active Directory and DNS where a predictable IP address is required.

Note: The first step in configuring a valid network configuration is to set the DNS servers and subnet masks for your virtual network in the Azure portal.

There is no nice GUI method for reserving an IP address. There is a PowerShell method, which gives you a clue as to how this stuff works under the hood.

The first step is to get your VM:

$VM=Get-AzureVM -ServiceName “Demo-MWH-A” -Name “Azure-DC1”

As you can see above, I am configuring a static IP address for a domain controller. Next, I set the static IP. Note that we are configuring a static virtual network IP for the VM.

Set-AzureStaticVNetIP -VM $VM -IPAddress “10.0.2.40” | Update-AzureVM

Also note, that in my tests, most of the time that I run Update-AzureVM, the VM is restarted. It doesn’t happen all of the time with these two cmdlets, but it happens most of the time.

Armed with these two cmdlets, you could set up a CSV file with Service/VM names and IP addresses, and run a loop to configure lots of VMs at once.

EDIT#1

To be clear, the above steps do not configure a static IP inside the guest OS – you should not do that. The above steps simply configure the virtual network to assign the same IP to your VM’s vNIC every time the VM starts up. You are manipulating the system to get the results you need.

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