Traditionally, in an on-premises environment we setup stretch clusters across regions to protect against region failure. Microsoft came up with Azure Site Recovery to give users the the capability to move their workloads into Azure during a site or workload down situation. In this article, we are going to talk about an alternate approach to protecting your workload if you have a Hyper-V Cluster. I will have a follow up article in which I will go into details regarding this approach.

With the new nested virtualization capabilities that have been added to Azure, it allows us to run Hyper-V on top of an Azure VM.

Learn more about Hyper-V nested virtualization.

The new series Dv3 and Ev3 allows us to run Hyper-V on them.

Here I have created a D4sV3 VM on which I installed Hyper-V. Also, the network on which the VM is placed is under my EXPRESSROUTE circuit. An on-premise environment consists of a two node Hyper-V Cluster managed by SCVMM 2016.

Now we can take two approaches to migrate our workloads in Azure.

Either create a new cluster on Azure and migrate your VM from on-prem cluster to one in Azure.
Add the Azure VM to the existing Cluster and setup a storage spaces cluster on Azure.

Approach 1:

Approach 1 is straight forward. We add the VM to the domain and then create a cluster in Azure. You can add an additional DC in Azure that can manage the DNS. Since we have Express Route connectivity between the locations, connectivity should not be a concern.

We can migrate the VM with the storage, sharing no information during the migration, on to the different cluster. We can also setup a replica broker role on both clusters and then start the Hyper-V replica for the VM On-premises. Depending on which Express Route Bandwidth you choose, replication may take some time. It took around 20 minutes for my 40 GB ubuntu VM to be replicated into Azure.

Hyper-V host on Azure shows up during VM migration.

VRHYP is the cluster on-prem and VRHYP2 is the one in Azure. This gives you the capability to have a Hyper-V as a service .

Ubuntu VM migrated into Azure and running seamlessly.

If required, you can always failback to the on-prem cluster.

Approach 2:

In Approach 2 we add the VM to the existing Hyper-V cluster and manage it with SCVMM. This approach will follow the standard stretched cluster without stretched VLAN, as that is not possible in Azure.

We have deployed the same logical switch across to the Hyper-V running in Azure. We can go in deeper in this scenario and create another VM and setup Hyper-V on that. Once we have the two nodes up we can add data disk to the nodes and create Storage Spaces Direct.

Learn more about S2D implementation on Azure.

Storage Spaces Direct can be set with different resiliency levels including 2x, 3x, or parity. At least 4 nodes are required to get parity, but you can go for two nodes if you are just getting started.

We must make sure that the CSV volume that we create is the same size of what we have on-prem. Now we will use the Storage Replica feature that is available with Server 2016. This way we will keep the replica copy of the CSV volume we have on-prem into Azure via ExpressRoute.

Learn more about Storage Replica Server 2016.

We performed this action so that if the on-prem cluster fails, the VM can seamlessly start on Hyper-V hosted on Azure. This way we do not have to depend on a third-party tool for storage replication.

In the end, I would suggest that this is an alternate approach to Azure Site Recovery. This approach gives you more control over the VM migration scenarios, but you are limited to Server 2016 and Hyper-V.

Vinayak Rattan

Partner Technical Consultant
Quelle: Azure

11. August 2017

da Agency

Someone Solved Your Phone Auto-Playing Music In The Car

Hello to anyone who has a car, has a friend with a car, rides in a car.

You are aware of this really annoying thing.

You know when you plug in your phone to the car to charge, or hook it up over Bluetooth so you can do handsfree or whatever…. As soon as you connect your phone, it starts playing the first song in your music library over the stereo?

Which is irritating because obviously you don’t want to listen to your entire music library in alphabetical order. Who would do that? Only a very deranged person! Why do cars do this?

Good news: a genius (a former BuzzFeed employee, duh) made a fix for this.

Samir Mezrahi, who works for the animal site The Dodo (and is a former BuzzFeed employee) created a simple hack. He made a song that’s just a blank sound, with the title “A a a a a Very Good Song”. This means that instead of some loud song playing as soon as you connect your phone, you’ll be playing this silent song. Which will give you the 3 seconds you need to turn off the music player.

You can buy the song through the iTunes store for 99 cents (sorry, peace and quiet is gonna cost you).

Buy it HERE.

Mezrahi told BuzzFeed that he made the song because it drove him nuts that every time he plugged in his phone to his car, the Taylor Swift song “All You Had To Do Was Stay” would start playing. “I also noticed a lot of people had the same problem with Vampire Weekend's ‘A-Punk’, Ed Sheeran’s ‘A Team’, the Kendrick Lamar song ‘ADHD’ and the Lady Gaga song ‘Ayo’,” he said.

The song has only been available in the iTunes store since August 7, but it’s actually cracked the top 100 (it’s currently at #63, just above “24K Magic” by Bruno Mars). But my old deskmate has no intention of pop stardom, but simply making Bluetooth less annoying. “People have tweeted me screenshots of them playing my song, and it definitely feels like i am making a difference in the world,” said Mezrahi.

THERE YOU GO. PROBLEM SOLVED, PEOPLE.

Quelle: <a href="Someone Solved Your Phone Auto-Playing Music In The Car“>BuzzFeed

11. August 2017

da Agency

Azure Data Factory July new features update

We are glad to announce that Azure Data Factory has added more new features in July, including:

Preview for Data Management Gateway high availability and scalability
Skipping or logging incompatible rows during copy for fault tolerance
Service principal authentication support for Azure Data Lake Analytics

We will go through each of these new features one by one in this blog post.

Preview for Data Management Gateway high availability and scalability

You can now associate multiple data management gateway nodes that are installed on different machines with a single logical gateway, so as to avoid Data Management Gateway being the single point of failure. In addition, this helps to scale out to achieve better copy performance. You can also choose to scale up each gateway node based on your load. Moreover, Azure Data Factory now provides a richer monitoring experience on gateway status and resource utilization from Azure portal. Learn more from Data Management Gateway – High Availability and Scalability Preview.

Skipping or logging incompatible rows during copy for fault tolerance

When copying data using Azure Data Factory Copy Activity, you now have different options to deal with incompatible data between source and sink data stores. You can choose to either abort and fail the copy run upon encountering incompatible data (default behavior), or continue copying all the data by skipping those incompatible rows. Additionally, you also have the option to log the incompatible rows in Azure Blob so you can examine the cause for failure, fix the data on the data source and retry. The feature is available via both Copy Wizard and JSON editing. Learn more about supported scenarios and configuration from the documentation page, Copy Activity fault tolerance – skip incompatible rows.

Service principal authentication support for Azure Data Lake Analytics

To use U-SQL Activity, Azure Data Factory now supports service principal authentication for Azure Data Lake Analytics like we did for Azure Data Lake Store earlier, in addition to the existing user credential authentication. We recommend that you use service principal authentication to get rid of periodical token expiration behavior with user credentials, especially for a scheduled U-SQL execution. Learn more about supported authentication types and configuration from documentation, Transform data by running U-SQL scripts on Azure Data Lake Analytics.

Above are the new features we introduced in July. Do you have questions or feedback? Share your thoughts with us on Azure Data Factory forum or feedback site, we’d love to hear more from you.
Quelle: Azure