storage size or storage performance you don't have to choose any more
between size and performance azure premium files gives you
both
i'm Dean Cefola and this is The Azure Academy if you want to master the azure
cloud you can start right now by clicking the subscribe button and the
notification bell so you don't miss anything
one quick thing before we get started today is that i'm starting a
new venture on top of the azure academy this is with my good friend christian
brinkoff and we are starting a video podcast
series called desktops in the cloud focusing on windows virtual desktop
and there's our youtube channel so please go out there and subscribe to the
channel be great if we could get to you know 10
000 subscribers by next week that'd be awesome
and let me play a quick intro for you hi there friends and welcome to the first
unofficial episode of desktops in the cloud your new technical driven video
podcast with guest speakers from microsoft
engineering and as well the worldwide virtual desktop communities
and i'm not doing this alone i'm teaming up here with my good friend dean zafola
from the azure academy series and with many people increasingly
working from home and all the new developments around windows virtual
desktop we'll keep you up to date with all the latest updates
best practices and more please follow us on our social channels
on youtube spotify twitter linkedin and our website
desktopsinthecloud.com and what better way to start with canva
brad the group pm leader of the windows virtual desktop team
so stay tuned as we release this episode very shortly from now
that's going to be a pretty cool thing and i think you'll get some enjoyment
out of that if you're following windows virtual desktop at all
so with that let's get back to today's topic azure files is a
fully managed file share that lives in the cloud
it's highly scalable in size and performance can be very easily backed up
with the push of a button and can be accessible anywhere in the
world and you can build it in just seconds
so here's the plan for premium files we're going to first build ourselves a
premium file share and i'll explain all of the performance and ins and outs of
all that then we're going to protect our premium file share
then finally i'm going to show you ways that we can use premium files
and for a bonus feature you're going to want to stick with us right to the end
of today's video because there's an announcement that just came
out that's really going to enhance how you use premium files you don't want to
miss that let's get into it over in the azure
portal i've got a resource group set up for today and at the top we'll just
click add and then at the very bottom of that
list we'll choose a storage account i'll call my storage account
msaa premium file zero zero and once you put in your
name select your region i'll go with each us
and we'll scroll down a little bit now here's where we choose between
standard and premium files so what is the big difference between the two
well the main difference of course is performance and that's because
standard file accounts are built on hard drives now hard drives have always been
great for capacity you get far more size but the performance is not as good
especially by today's standards so while standard files is built on hard
drives premium files is built exclusively on ssds
now remember i said in the intro that you don't have to choose between
size and performance and that's because you can get the same
amount of storage size out of your file share
up to 100 terabytes as of today the performance and throughput that you can
get in premium files is 10 times greater
than what you can get in standard as you can see from this chart from the azure
documentation which is linked in the description below
so today i'll be choosing a premium files account and then we have to choose
our account kind and we'll be choosing file storage
and when you do the other thing to keep in mind for your storage
is replication now premium files is only available in locally redundant storage
and zone redundant storage so if you need the
storage itself to be resilient across zones then choose zrs otherwise lrs is
fine so we'll hit next for networking and
this is where you have the choice to secure
your storage account and lock it down using a private endpoint also known as a
azure private link and we have done a video on that and
we'll link that up at the top so you can go check that out if you missed it
by default all storage accounts are open to all networks
or you could choose to set it to a selected network or you can go with the
full private endpoint like we talked about in the video so for
today i'm just going to use the public endpoint and we'll hit next for data
protection now a lot of these options are grayed
out because they're related to blob storage but the one that we can take
advantage of is soft delete for azure files which
i'll turn on and enable for seven days and we've
covered all these features in a previous video on storage data protection which
i'll link at the top you can go check that out
and we'll click next and the only thing that i want you to make sure you have
enabled is that secure transfer is set to
enabled we'll hit next and add our tags and once you're done with that go ahead
and hit the review and create button now while that's provisioning back in
our resource group i'm going to add another resource
and i'll search for backup and site recovery this is
azure backup i'll hit create for this there's a direct integration of azure
files into azure backup and i'll give it a
name of premium backup in the east us region
hit next for my tags and when you're ready go ahead and create
now that all that has finished creating let's go into our storage account and
you can see we've got just a file share as an option let's click
file shares and we'll create ourselves a new file share and then we have our
provisioned capacity and this is how much
space we want and based on the size of the
share that we provision we will get a certain amount of performance this is
also shown as a table inside the azure docs
which again is linked in the description down below and the more space you give
it the more performant it will be i want to have
30 000 iops i need to provision 30 terabytes of storage
so i'll hit create and the share is created just that fast now back in the
share if i go to properties and then try to go to azure
backup we can set up from here directly our backup
policy and start to protect our file shares and
notice that it's already selected my premium backup vault because they're
in the same region and create a new file backup policy i'm
going to create multiple restore points here one every seven days
three weeks 14 months and 10 years and you can do
whatever it is that suits your environment i'll hit ok then we'll click
to enable backup and our setup has completed and let's look at our recovery
services vault and backups and we have one backup item we click on
that and it shows an azure storage account and there is our
file share let's get into some use cases the very
straightforward one of course is that you can just go into your file
share and at the top you can click connect and then you set whatever drive
letter you like i'll go with the p drive for premium
files click copy open the powershell ise drop your
code in there and run that code it will test and make sure that you can
reach the storage and then it will map the drive for you and then we can just
open up our windows explorer and there is our
share at 30 terabytes and i'll just copy some files in
from another file share that i have then we can jump back to the azure portal
click the refresh and there's all of the files so a direct way to mount the file
share and that's great for one computer but we want to make this
usable by more systems at the same time back in the azure
storage account on the left we'll go to configuration
and at the very bottom here we want to enable active directory
domain services authentication we have done a video on that
already so you can click that if you haven't seen that one yet and i've
updated the code for all of my variables and after you've run the first half of
the code to get everything set up we can then run lines 26 through
30 and that'll do the storage account join and in about a minute or so
that will complete and then you can verify that everything's working
by running the debug command at the end and all of our health checks are passed
we've successfully joined our storage account to our domain now we just need
to test it and i'm logged in now with the user nova
and we've got the windows file explorer and i'll just paste in the unc and we've
got instant access so everything is working from the ad
side and i'll create a test folder and then
we can just verify that inside our share and there is the nova
test folder so this can be used now as a standard
file share across anywhere in your active directory
for regular file shares scale out file servers for windows virtual desktop and
more now that we've got our premium share set up let's work on our cluster
and this would be a good point for me to remind you that if you haven't yet
subscribed to the azure academy go ahead and click that button
join us here at our community and click that thumbs up if you're enjoying our
content now if you've seen our recent video on
shared disks in azure we already provisioned a cluster
using a graphical method and this time we're going to do it with powershell but
first we need virtual machines but that also means
that we want these virtual machines to be as close to each other and to our
storage as possible which means first we want a
proximity placement group so we'll search for that in the
marketplace and then click to create it and we'll give it a name of sql dash ppg
and next add our tags and then go ahead and
create it and now we're ready to build our virtual machines so we'll go back to
the marketplace we'll search for azure sql and then hit
create this will give us the options for building out sql in all its forms from
the pas service to sql managed instance to a sql
virtual machine and if you're interested in us starting
a series on sql or any other data services give me some comments
down below and we'll take care of getting that started i'm just going to
use the free license for today and hit create
for the name of our server is sql dash zero i'm building that
inside an availability set we'll just be using a premium
disk for the operating system and this will be built on
my existing virtual network but on the advanced screen
don't forget to add your proximity placement group because just like the
availability set you've got to do that at the build time
next is the sql server settings this is actually going to represent our sql
installation in azure i'm not going to spend a whole
lot of time on this today because this video is more about premium files
i'm going to use a standard sql port of 1433 with sql authentication
turned on then we'll scroll down a little bit and
we have the disk configuration so i'll click
change here to show you what i'm doing and here i've chosen to deploy
a 8 gig disk as the smallest disk that i could deploy for this type of solution
since i have the logs also being stored where the
data disk is we'll click next and add our tags then
we'll hit review and create and because i want two servers in my
cluster i'll go ahead and repeat that whole process in the background
and i've opened up the powershell ise and copied in the connection code
from the premium file share and i'm also going to create a directory called sql
test just to make sure i can write to it and we've got our map drive going out to
the sql cluster and there's our sql test folder and just
repeat that on the other vms in your cluster before you continue with the
next step now the rest of this code i've gotten
out of the azure documentation which is linked below in the description area
and this is what's going to actually set up our cluster so the first thing
we need to install all the cluster features and i'll do that on both vms
from the same powershell console and then we're ready to start
doing our cluster so let's run the test against the
cluster and see if everything is ready to go
and our validation report shows one warning on the network
side and that is that we have a single network
card inside our vms which as we covered in our last cluster
video not a problem in azure we can ignore
that issue but we are ready to go now how you set up the new
cluster is gonna depend on what operating system you have do you have a
load balancer or are you using the dynamic network name
so for a load balancer configuration your management point network type
should be singleton if you're using a dnn then you can set
it to distributed or you can just leave it to automatic
server 2019 will default to distributed so whatever
works for you i'll set mine to automatic and go ahead and run the new cluster
build and if we go back to the failover
cluster manager and we click to connect to the cluster
and we say cluster on this server and hit ok we've got a failover cluster
ready to go now we need to set up our quorum that
we're going to use so i'll right click on the cluster
go to more actions and then configure cluster quorum settings
we'll click next and then select the quorum witness
select next and then you can choose from a disk file or
cloud witness and i'll choose cloud now we need the name of our storage
account and back in azure i'm going to pull this storage account
that i had in a shared resource group paste that in and now we need the
storage account key and that's over here on the access keys
on the left you can grab either access key and just paste it into the wizard
then we hit next let that finish and now we have our
cloud witness so on the c drive you'll find your sql server install
and we're going to run setup and about in the middle you'll find the new
sql server cluster installation and that's what we'll click on
and we'll be going with the free version in this case
and i've just clicked next through the wizard and taken all the defaults up
till this point where we want to set up the database engine configuration
this is where premium files comes in you want to take the data root
user user log and backup directories and put them all on
premium file storage i'll paste in the path to get to the premium file storage
then hit next so i'll hit ok and hit next
and then we're ready to install our cluster
so the cluster setup is complete we've got both nodes added into the cluster
sql two here actually owns the cluster at this point which you can see up here
at the top the current host server and if we look over at the roles
there is the sql cluster and all of the resources
related to the cluster but out in the file share we've got the folder
structure for all of our databases logs jobs etc
and here i've opened up the sql management studio just for a quick
example and there's all of our basic built-in databases
i'll go to right click and add a new database i'll just give it a name of
premium files and hit ok and there's our new database over on the
left and going out to azure files into the data folder
there are our premium database and log files
then we'll just write a simple query here and this will create a couple
tables for us and then populate them all with data
over on the tables now we've got our analytics azure academy and contributors
table now you can just proceed to use the
cluster as normal and know that if you need
extra horsepower under the hood you can always increase the amount of storage
available through premium files which will then boost you according to however
many iops you allocate so the bonus feature that i wanted to
talk about today is that smb multi-channel is now enabled for your
premium files storage account here is the announcement
blog and i'll have this linked in the video description with smb multi-channel
now you can get more connections from a single server so if you think about this
for file services or fslogix and windows
virtual desktop getting multiple connections from a single vm
into storage to be able to increase your
throughput over that multi-channel connection
really will pick up your performance and take advantage of all of those higher
iops that are available we need a special url to get there and
that is aka dot ms forward slash smb multi-channel
preview and that'll just enable this feature in your browser and now you can
see we've got active directory soft elite and smb
multi-channel all we have to do to enable it is just flip the switch and
hit save so give me some comments down below
on how you're going to take advantage of azure files and i hope you've enjoyed
taking this quick look at this great service and the multiple ways that we
can get it implemented and locked down and secured so you can get as much
storage size and storage performance as you need
so if you liked our video today or learned something new go ahead and smash
the like button that lets me know that you appreciate
our content also helps us out with the youtube algorithm
and the more people who like and subscribe to the videos and to the
channel of course boosts us overall which is a big help to us and then we
can help out more people at the same time
and we are here to help you so give us some questions below or comments on what
you would like us to make for our next video
and if you're looking for something additional you can watch our latest
video over here on the top right or one that we've had our masters over
youtube pick out for you that you can keep on learning about azure
thanks very much for joining us and we will catch you in our next video
happy learning