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Category: Cloud

Migrating A VM To Azure

Published 2015-12-11 by Kevin Feasel

I have a post up on how I migrated my presentation VM to Azure:

Once sysprep was done, I needed to find a way to get the VMDK files converted to VHDs.  A blog post turned me on to StarWind Software’s V2V Converter.  It’s a free tool which allows you to convert virtual hard drive files from one format to another.  Installing this tool let me turn my set of VMDKs into one 45GB VHD.  One note is that, at least on my machine, I needed to run the V2V Converter from a command prompt; executing the app directly from the Start menu would cause the app to appear for a moment and then disappear, as though some error killed the program.  The tool installs by default in “%programfiles(x86)%\StarWind Software\StarWind V2V Image Converter\StarV2V.exe” From there, I just needed to get that big image into Azure.

This VM is really a Plan C or Plan D for me, but it’s good to have layers of redundancy.

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Loading Azure SQL Database Data

Published 2015-12-10 by Kevin Feasel

Mickey Stuewe digs into Azure SQL Database:

While I waited…and waited for my Utility data to be inserted into my Azure database, I did some poking around to see if it was even possible to restore a local SQL Server 2014 backup to an Azure database. Guess what, I found something (And there was much rejoicing).

On CodePlex, I found a SQL Database Migration Wizard that can be used to restore the database. They even had Migration Wizards for 2008R2, 2012, and 2014. SQL Database Migration Wizard v3.15.6, v4.15.6 and v5.15.6

If you have an MSDN license, go play with this.  Even if you don’t, the lowest tier Azure SQL Database instances are free, so there’s no reason not to learn about them.

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Naming Azure Servers

Published 2015-12-07 by Kevin Feasel

With Azure SQL Database, you can choose the server name:

Once you select the option to create a new server, you see similar options to those you saw in the Azure Management Portal. However, this time you see a server name.

Alas, you can again name your own database servers!  As you can see above in the Azure Preview Portal, the server has been created with the provided name. Then if we switch over to the Azure Management Portal, we will see the same.

Choose your names wisely.

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Azure SQL Database Threat Detection

Published 2015-12-04 by Kevin Feasel

Troy Hunt introduces us to a fantastic new feature with Azure SQL Databases:

Azure has just introduced another tool to help in the fight against SQL injection known as SQL Database Threat Detection. You can go and read all the Microsofty bits there or watch it work in a real live app here.

Firstly, this is threat detection, not prevention. In a nutshell, this feature will tell you when an attack is mounted against your database and in order to do that, the upstream app has to have a vulnerability in it that’s allowing the attack to get that far. Now before you give it a bit of “well that’s pretty useless then”, the main reason this makes sense is that you can go and enable it with a single checkbox tick and it won’t break your things. Plus, even if the code is solid and you have a device or a service like a WAF, this is just one more layer that’s good to have in place. Let’s just jump into it.

This is a useful tool. If you’re using Azure SQL Databases, go forth and activate this.

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Getting Started With Azure

Published 2015-12-03 by Kevin Feasel

Mickey Stuewe introduces us to Azure:

At the bottom of the portal, there is a New link and a Delete link. These are for creating and deleting databases.

After clicking the New link, I went through a series of screens to create my database.

The first screen asked me for the name of my database and what size database I wanted to create. This is an important step, since it will affect my monthly charges. Remember, I only have $150 in free credits each month. You can go here to see the pricing for the various service tiers and the performance levels. I chose to create the smallest database I could (2 GB, and 5 DTUs). I also created this database on a new SQL Database Server (I kind of have to, since it is the first database).

Louis Davidson has begun to embrace(?) the cloud as well:

Both of the products, the On Premises versions and the Azure SQL Database versions are part of the Relational Database family of products. They share a common base, and a common purpose: to work with relational data. They look basically the same, and operate mostly the same, and serve (at their core) very same purposes.

As such I will make sure that all of the scripts that end up in the final book have been validated on the different editions of SQL Server (as I have always done), and have been executed at least once on Azure SQL Database as well. What I won’t do is go into many details of how to connect to an Azure SQL Database, mostly because it takes quite a few pages to do so (I just tech edited a book that covers such details, and I will direct readers to that book for details on how to connect… Peter Carter “Pro SQL Server Admin” http://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781484207116).

We’re already seeing Microsoft move to a cloud-first philosophy, so get in on Azure if you’ve avoided it thus far.

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Azure Storage Options

Published 2015-12-02 by Kevin Feasel

James Serra walks us through the list of storage options available on Azure:

Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform and infrastructure, created by Microsoft, for building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft-managed and Microsoft partner-hosted datacenters.  Included in this platform are multiple ways of storing data.  Below I will give a brief overview of each so you can get a feel for the best use case for each, with links provided that go into more detail:

There are several options available, running the gamut from unstructured data (blob storage, file & disk storage), semi-structured data (data lake store), to structured data (Azure SQL Database) and a few points in between.

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Building An Azure VM Of SQL Server 2016 CTP3

Published 2015-11-17 by Kevin Feasel

Dan English shows us an easy way to build a SQL Server 2016 CTP 3 instance:

If you have an Azure account (possibly through your MSDN subscription) here is the easiest way to get up and running with SQL Server 2016.

First go to the Azure Portal – http://portal.azure.com

Search and find the SQL Server 2016 CTP3 in the Data and Analytics Marketplace in Azure.

My preference is to grab the ISO and build a local VM, or install it on a server in my environment.  But if your server infrastructure lives on Azure or you’ve got those MSDN credits to burn, this is a good alternative.

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Connect To Azure VM Via SSMS

Published 2015-11-13 by Kevin Feasel

Derik Hammer shows you how to connect to an Azure VM hosting SQL Server:

After you provision a Microsoft Azure VM with SQL Server there are a few more steps that you need to take to make remote connections. The procedure below starts with a fresh Azure VM provisioned and walks through the process of establishing a connection via SQL Server Management Studio, installed on an on-premises work station.

Note that this is Azure IaaS, not Azure SQL Database.

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Red Gate SQL Monitor On Azure VMs

Published 2015-11-10 by Kevin Feasel

Thomas Rushton has a post on VLAN rules necessary to get Red Gate SQL Monitor to work in an environment running on Azure VMs:

Our basic architecture was:

  • Multiple VLANs containing SQL Servers to be monitored
  • VLAN containing the monitoring server

Probably not the best for what we were wanting to do, but you work with what you’re given. I installed SQL Monitor, fired it up, and nothing worked.

After much trial and error, and a lot of network monitoring by a very enthusiastic young infrastructure guy, here are the inbound rules that we needed to put in place on each SQL Server VLAN to get this working

Note that this is Azure IaaS, not Azure SQL Database.

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Get Started With U-SQL

Published 2015-11-09 by Kevin Feasel

Microsoft is pushing U-SQL pretty hard.  Here’s a tutorial by Jonathan Gao to whet your appetite:

U-SQL is a language that unifies the benefits of SQL with the expressive power of your own code to process all data at any scale. U-SQL’s scalable distributed query capability enables you to efficiently analyze data in the store and across relational stores such as Azure SQL Database. It enables you to process unstructured data by applying schema on read, insert custom logic and UDF’s, and includes extensibility to enable fine grained control over how to execute at scale. To learn more about the design philosophy behind U-SQL, please refer to this Visual Studio blog post.

You do need Data Lake Tools for Visual Studio, but it looks like you can run it locally.

The VS blog had something a month ago on the topic.  I’m not saying get on it…yet…

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