In order to proactively avoid problems in our Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines, it’s necessary to have the system admin to receive alerts for unpatched, misconfigured, or unsupported configurations. System Center Advisor from Microsoft can do this. System Center Advisor is a free web service which monitors and analyses installation of Microsoft Server 2008 (and later versions).
Alerts and regular assessment of server configurations
Activate and Deploy System Center Advisor
Before we can configure System Center Advisor, we need to enable the service on the Advisor website. To do that, we just login to the website with the same Microsoft account to activate it. After that, we need to deploy a software, which is part of Advisor, on our server on Azure. The software needs to be installed locally in the virtual machine.
Activated account before the deployment of Advisor software on the server
To deploy Advisor on the server, we need to install gateways and agents on our selected servers. Due to the fact that we are going to only install a stand-alone Advisor to give the system admin a way to access the alerts in Advisor web portal, we just need to install gateways and agents on selected servers.
The agent is responsible for collecting data about the server and storing it locally on the server. For every 24 hours, the agent will then pass the information to the gateway which is in charge of sending the information to the Advisor account.
Plan for Advisor Deployment
After the Advisor configuration is completed, within the next 24 hours, we should already be able to see the data being shown in the Advisor web portal.
Conclusion
The entire installation process is very simple. There are also a few related online articles that I found, as listed below.
There are two options available in Microsoft Azure to host our SQL database. One is the well-known Azure SQL Database, an implementation of Platform as a Service for a relational database service in the cloud. The other one option is introduced after the new Infrastructure as a Service capabilities of Microsoft Azure. It is now possible to easily deploy instances of MS SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machine.
Azure SQL Database or SQL Server in Azure VM?
Personally, I prefer to directly deploy SQL Server in the virtual machine. At least the entire process looks about the same as what I have already done in our on-premise database server. So, having SQL Server deployed on Azure virtual machine actually means that the developers do not need to make huge changes to our existing applications. In addition, it’s also because migrating existing applications to the cloud normally needs to emulate on-premises behaviour. In short, choosing SQL Server in Azure virtual machine saves the time on migration.
Choose “SQL Server 2012” image to deploy MS SQL Server on the new virtual machine.
The following table shows the pricing of each edition running on Azure VM as well as the disk sizes available. Here I only pay attention to the memory intensive instances, i.e. A5, A6, and A7. They have larger RAM and disk sizes for the virtual machine and they are thus considered optimal for hosting databases and other high-throughput application. The data shown in the table is applicable for virtual machines deployed in Asia Pacific Southeast, i.e. Singapore.
Asia Pacific Southeast (Singapore) VM pricing for each edition of SQL Server (screenshot taken on 20 April 2014)
Connect to SQL Server Database Engine on Azure VM
After the virtual machine is up and running, we can immediately RDP in to the VM. Then in there, we just need to launch Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio to access the database with the Windows Authentication.
Running SQL Server Management Studio on the virtual machine.
Open TCP Port 1433
SQL Server typically uses TCP port 1433 for remote connections to the database. So, we need to add an endpoint as well as to open the port in the virtual machine firewall for this. However, to avoid security attack, it’s recommended to specify a different Public Port when creating the endpoint in Azure.
1433: A TCP port normally used by MS SQL Server for remote connection to the database.
SQL Server Authentication
We need to change the server authentication to “SQL Server and Windows Authentication mode”. This enables us to create logins in SQL Server which are not based on Windows user accounts. Both the login ID and passwords will be stored in the SQL Server. This allows SQL Server to continue supporting our third-party applications that require SQL Server Authentication. After that, we just right-click on the server in Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Object Explorer to restart the server.
SQL Server and Windows Authentication Mode
Connecting Application to the SQL Server
To connect your ASP .NET web application with the database, in web.config, you can just key in the server name, port number together with login ID and password in the following connection string that is used to connect the instance of the SQL Server running on Azure VM.
Last year April, I received a newsletter from Windows Azure Team saying that Windows Azure Virtual Machines were generally available. Finally, full control and management of virtual machines on Azure is now possible! The release undoubtedly successfully brought Microsoft Azure closer to Amazon who is also focusing on IaaS.
The reason that I’m so happy with the announcement is because I have already an ASP .NET Web Application running on my server running on Windows Server 2008 in a data centre. I would like to find out how to host it on cloud. Since I have already tried out Amazon last time with friends, so now I am interested to see how fun it will be to host my application on Azure and what benefits it will provide.
Beginning of Journey: When Affinity Group Brings Your Services Together
Before creating a new virtual machine in Azure, I create a new Affinity Group. Affinity Groups will be able to group Microsoft Azure services by locating them in the same data centre to optimize performance.
Create a new affinity group.
Create Virtual Machine
Same as Amazon, I am allowed to create my virtual machine in Microsoft Azure with an image that is already offered in the Microsoft Azure Management Portal. So, there is no need for me to upload any Windows Server image created on-premise. Thus, the first step is to choose an image. Surprisingly, they provide also things like Ubuntu Servers, Oracle servers, openSUSE, and so on.
I need to choose operating system running on the VM from the Gallery.
There are sometimes multiple versions available for one image. So after choosing an image, for example the Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, I get to choose the version of the OS that I want. As a best practice, it’s recommended to always choose the one with latest release date.
After choosing the tier, I will be able to pick one of the available sizes for the virtual machine from the Size dropdown list. There are many size codes, from A0 to A7. As David Aiken, Azure Group Technical Manager, said in Windows Azure for IT Pros Jump Start, the letter “A” and the number behind the “A” don’t mean anything. Seriously, it’s just a code. Also, the code has nothing to do with the paper size that we are familiar with. By the way, I think David did predict it correctly. There is really a A5 size introduced recently. Wow.
“It was fun naming them”. David Aiken explaining the naming of sizes for virtual machine.
Of course, the smaller the instance, the lower the price we need to pay. The following is a screenshot of the virtual machine pricing details for Asia Pacific Southeast (i.e. Singapore) which I am interested at. You can read more about the details on pricing and available VM disk sizes on Microsoft websites as well.
Asia Pacific Southeast (Singapore) VM Pricing (screenshot taken on 18 April 2014)
After the size for the new virtual machine is decided, the next thing that I need to do is create a user account to access the VM later. There is a nice feature in the management console is that it does not allow us to use “admin” or “administrator” as the user name for security purpose.
Configure Virtual Machine: Cloud Service, Affinity Group, and Availability Set
Up to this point, the virtual machine earlier is not yet created. There is other configuration needed. First of all, we need to decide which Cloud Service to use. Cloud Service is basically a boundary of management, configuration, networking, security, etc that hosts the virtual machines in it. So, virtual machine must be stored in a cloud service. By doing so, we do not need to worry about hardware failure and network issues because Cloud Service will be there to help making our applications on the virtual machines are continuously available when those issues happen. Thus. it’s a way to make your application highly-available.
Secondly, in the “Region/Affinity Group/Virtual Network” dropdown, since I have created an Affinity Group in advance, so I get to choose not just the usual region but also Affinity Groups that I have created.
Thirdly, since I don’t have a Storage Account yet, so by default, it will choose the only option “Use an automatically generated storage account”.
Finally, I will create an Availability Set for this virtual machine. Availability Set tells the Fabric Controller (which functions as the kernel of Azure OS) to place virtual machines across fault domains (groups of resources anticipated to fail together, i.e. same rack / same server) and update domains (groups of resources that will be updated together). An availability set makes sure that your application is not affected by single points of failure, like the network switch or the power unit of a rack of servers. It is okay not to create Availability Set before the virtual machine is created but specifying Availability Set after the virtual machine has been provisioned will cause reboot.
Virtual Machine Configuration Page
The Endpoints
To allow communication with the virtual machine from external resources, endpoints need to be added in order to have them to handle the inbound network traffic to the virtual machine. In addition, when an endpoint is created, there is a need to create an inbound rule in the Windows Firewall with Advanced Security in the virtual machine to allow the traffic route through the endpoint.
So, in order to enable public to view the ASP .NET web applications that I host on the virtual machine, I will first need to create an endpoint for HTTP on the Azure management portal for the virtual machine. After that, I just need to install the IIS windows feature on the virtual machine together with Application Development feature added to allow HTTP traffic.
Finally, I also add endpoints for the FTP (such as port 21) because I need FTP access to this server. There was an interesting error when I try to upload file to the FTP Server using Filezilla. The error said, “The supplied message is incomplete. The signature was not verified.” Luckily, there are already people discussing online going on with some solutions to the problem. One of them is applying a hotfix from Microsoft which I have the link to it in the list below. It turns out that this error will only occur on Windows Server 2012 (R2) and Windows 8(.1).
There are some online articles which help me to better configure the endpoints and have both the web server and FTP setup on the virtual machine.
Basically, this covers the basic stuff of setting up Azure virtual machine as both a web server and FTP server. It is quite straightforward and about the same as what I did on Amazon EC2. If you would like to learn more, I’d suggest you to attend the online courses about Microsoft Azure on Microsoft Virtual Academy.
Two years ago, my friend recommended me to try out the latest Visual Studio after he found out that I was still using VS2008. Recently, I finally decided to switch to use VS2012 while the latest version is already VS2013. Oh well, never mind. However, there was a strange error when I first published my ASP.NET website from VS2012 to the server. Part of the error message is shown below.
Server Error in '/' Application.
Client found response content type of 'text/html; charset=utf-8', but expected 'text/xml'.
The request failed with the error message:
--
<html>
<head>
<title>Configuration Error</title>
<style>
body {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size: .7em;color:black;}
p {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;color:black;margin-top: -5px}
b {font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:bold;color:black;margin-top: -5px}
H1 { font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size:18pt;color:red }
H2 { font-family:"Verdana";font-weight:normal;font-size:14pt;color:maroon }
pre {font-family:"Lucida Console";font-size: .9em}
.marker {font-weight: bold; color: black;text-decoration: none;}
.version {color: gray;}
.error {margin-bottom: 10px;}
.expandable { text-decoration:underline; font-weight:bold; color:navy; cursor:hand; }
</style>
</head>
<body bgcolor="white">
<span><H1>Server Error in '/' Application.<hr width=100% size=1 color=silver></H1>
<h2> <i>Configuration Error</i> </h2></span>
<font face="Arial, Helvetica, Geneva, SunSans-Regular, sans-serif ">
<b> Description: </b>An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.
<br><br>
<b> Parser Error Message: </b>It is an error to use a section registered as allowDefinition='MachineToApplication' beyond application level. This error can be caused by a virtual directory not being configured as an application in IIS.<br><br>
...
It turns out that I already did something wrong in the beginning of migration from older version of Visual Studio to VS2012. Normally, for projects created in older version of Visual Studio, they will need to go through some modifications before they can be opened in VS2012. So, there is a one-way upgrade performed when the project is opened in VS2012 for the first time.
There is a need to upgrade the project when it’s created in older VS but is now opened in new VS.
After the upgrade is done, a migration report will be available. In addition, there will be a Backup folder created in the solution directory. Visual Studio is so nice that it automatically creates a Backup folder storing the copy of the project before the one-way upgrade. However, this also creates a problem because inside the folder, there is a web.config file. So now there will be two web.config files in the solution directory. The error suggests that the code was expecting a virtual directory with only one web.config to be setup on IIS. Thus, having two web.config files in the same directory will cause the error mentioned above to happen.
So, the solution? Just move the Backup folder to somewhere else.
Sometimes, this solution may not be working for your case if you happen to encounter the same error. Hence, I’d like to share with you some other solutions which may help you.
This solution is provided by Microsoft team on Visual Studio feedback page. They claimed that it’s a bug and it would be fixed in the future release of “ASP.NET Web Framework and Tools”.
It turns out that if IIS application is not created, the same error will occur. We need to click on the “Create” button if we notice the “Application Name” is greyed out.
cuteprogramming 