Friday, January 3, 2014

Windows Azure Pack - Forcing VM Roles to be Highly Available


Windows Azure Pack - Forcing VM Roles to be Highly Available

This is just a short blog post on how to force your VM Roles deployed with Windows Azure Pack, to be highly available.

Perhaps you have received an error while deploying your VM Roles, or just simply discovered that they are not HA and is located directly on one of the hosts local storage.

The solution is simple, but for most people it is a hidden one.

The VM cloud in VMM must have a custom property called CreateHighlyAvailableVmRoles with its value set to true in order for the VM Roles to be configured as highly available.

Since the VM Roles is created outside of VMM, we are not able to tag corresponding Hardware and Guest profiles or the templates itself.

1.       In VMM Console, select VMs and Services
2.       Right Click on the cloud that the Plan in Windows Azure Pack is using and select properties
3.       Select the Custom Properties tab and click Manage Custom Properties
4.       Select Cloud for Object Type, and click Create to create a new property
5.       Name the property CreateHighlyAvailableVmRoles and click OK
6.       Select the new property and click Add
7.       Click OK
8.       Type true for the property value
9.       Click OK



Now, log back to the service management portal and refresh the browser. The next deployment should succeed, and place the VM Roles on shared storage (either SMB3.0 or CSV) and the VMs should be highly available.


2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Kristian, quick question for you.. how do you handle Windows licences with virtual machine role? When I try to deploy a machine server role the install wait for the windows licences and there is no place in the UI to enter a licence or to provide a os profile,,, how do you configure the license?

Thanks!

Kristian Nese said...

The VM Roles is based on a RESDEF package (the language that the portal understand - that also contains the view you are seeing in portal) and a RESEXT package - the language that VMM understand. The RESDEF will define if the licencekey - window is shown in the portal. In my case, I am using an image that has the licence present and will register with the host. If you want the user to provide the key, then you must enable this in the view before importing it again.
-kn