moving your enterprise to the cloud should involve some careful planning and
assessments you need to identify the services you think you need and then how
you're gonna manage and operate them along with that performance requirements
are going to be a top consideration storage performance in particular is
what I want to talk about today in the area of shared storage in the cloud we
have talked about Azure Files and that is a great offering for shared storage
in fact I have a video coming soon on setting up a SQL failover cluster
instance with Azure Premium files so subscribe so you don't miss that but I
want to shift the shared storage conversation just a little bit and talk
about Azure NetApp Files
I'm Dean Cefola and this is the Azure Academy Azure NetApp files or ANF or
short is a first party service in Azure that means that you don't have to add it
from the azure marketplace like a third party type tool but it's available in
the azure portal today and we're gonna walk you through setting all of this up
so this means also that if you have an issue with net up files you can put in a
support request just like any other Azure resource and then ANF specialists
will be able to deal with that and get that resolved for you and before we get
started today I just want to give a big shout-out for Kirk Ryan is in that app
principal technologist and helped me to learn about net app for this video you
can check him out here on his LinkedIn page as well as his YouTube channel do
me a favor and subscribe to his channel and thank him for the work that he's
done in the community and he's got a lot of other great videos here on netapp if
you're interested in diving deeper on this subject over here in the Azure
Doc's you can find the ANF Doc's by scrolling down and going to storage and
then right here in the middle Azure net app files and we're gonna go to this
link for what is net app files now the use case around ANF is really where you
need high storage capacity or you have specific performance demands for your
applications so we'll quickly go here to concepts on the left and we'll scroll
down under solutions you can see that there's a bunch of hero solutions around
ANF and that's from HPC and AKS and we are starting series on both of those so
go ahead and subscribe so you don't miss that oracle is also here as well as SAP
and by the way you are interested in us starting an SAP series give me some
comments down below SAP in particular is a great hero solution for ANF because
out of the three major cloud vendors of AWS GCP and Azure, Azure NetApp files is
the only shared file system certified for use with SAP HANA so if you're
interested in more information on that let me know down below and we can put
together several videos on SAP solutions and i'll scroll down just a
little bit more because you can see Windows virtual desktop is also here as
a hero solution for ANF and we're going to be showing that off today
with FSLogix let's go back to the overview for a second to understand the
storage hierarchy and we'll click this link on the right for the conceptual
diagram so we can get a good look at this so at the very top this is already
a part of all azor subscriptions as a first party service but we do have to
enable it and we'll show you how to do that in a second and that service is
broken down across the different Azure regions and in each of those regions
there are capacity pools and that's where all of the storage appliances are
and in there's where we build the volumes that you can see in your end of
the environment where then you build out all of your shares
now the shares in themselves and we'll show you again more about this in a
second the performance of your shares are directly proportional to the
capacity of your shares and I don't mean capacity as an empty space I mean the
provision size of the share itself under the concept section here's a quick look
at the resource limits for NetApp files just so you have that for your frame of
reference you can dig more into that on your own and then we have also the
metrics for the monitoring side so that you can see different options that you
have around your capacity and performance monitoring and then we have
the link here for the cost model and this is like all other things in Azure a
consumption based pricing model you can build your shares with a minimum of 4
terabytes up to 400 terabytes and you can expand it in one terabyte increments
and over here on the right I'll go to manual changes of the pool size is one
other thing here I want to point out and when you do a change in the size of the
pool that change will then become that billing hours increment so if you're in
HPC and you're running a batch job and you need the next hour of performance so
that you can finish that job much faster you will be charged at that new size for
the entire hour even if you only used it for 10 minutes ok so keep that in mind
over here in the azure portal we can find ANF either by typing it into the
search box at the top or you can find it under the all services menu by going to
the storage category and then you can see ANF is right over here so I'll
launch ANF and then I'll go to create my net app account and when we do since I'm
not currently set up for it we have this blue box here at the bottom where
we need to register for NetApp files well go ahead and click that link that
brings us out to the dock here and we've got this blue box here at the top
telling us that before registering we have to have received the email from the
NetApp files team confirming that we've been granted access to the service now
hold on a second what's going on here I thought this was a first party service
in Azure and yes it is this is actually being done on purpose and the reason why
has nothing to do with being some third party service because net up files has
guaranteed performance metrics that they need to hit we need to be sure that
there is enough capacity in the azure platform to satisfy all of the users so
because of that the onboarding process is staggered like this because again
remember this is enterprise class high-performance workloads we're talking
about and if we see a drop in performance then that breaks the SLA s
that's being offered then customer satisfaction goes down and Microsoft
certainly wants to avoid that so these kind of careful steps are taken on this
particular service so what you can do first here is number one says is you can
click this link you can fill out this form and that'll go to the ANF team and
we'll scroll down just a little bit and you can see it's talking about what type
of workloads you are looking to host and especially there's that call out again
for SAP HANA as well as understanding some of your use case and what regions
you're looking to use this in once you've gotten that notice back from the
ANF team then your subscription that should be and enabled to start using it
you need to give NetApp a name here and I'll call mine ANF-0 you select
the subscription and resource group you want to build it in as well as your
region and then we hit create our net up account has been set up that will click
on that and now the next thing we need to do is create a capacity pool now the
capacity pool is just a logical construct of representing our disks so
I'll click Add at the top here and we need to give our capacity pool a name
and I'll call it ANF-pool-0 and here's where we can select our service
level and the service levels are directly tied to the performance tier
that you're going to have your storage allocated on and before we pick which
service level we want let's go back to the docs and under the concepts in the
table of contents we have these service levels for NetApp and you can see the
range here from standard at 16 megabytes of
throughput per terabyte all the way up to 128 back in the portal for my example
here I'm just going to pick the standard tier and then we have to choose our size
now the smallest size that we can provision is 4 terabytes so for the
start of this example I'll just provision the 4 and we'll hit OK
and now that it's complete we'll click on our capacity pool since we want to
use an SMB share we're going to need to do one thing before we create our
volumes and that is to set up our Active Directory connection and this is because
we're going to be able to leverage Active Directory or authentication to
our net app share so click the join button at the top and I've filled out
all the required information here so we've got the IP addresses for our
primary and secondary DNS server the fully qualified name of our domain as
well as the name of our ad site what prefix we want the computer object
that we're going to create to have and if we want to specify the OU path
where we'll create that object as well as our credentials
now Microsoft does not store any of these credentials and these creds will
be used to set up an ad computer object so be sure that the account you use has
rights to do that here are my domain controller i've got ad sites and
services open and this is where you can find your site name and my site name in
this case is just called Azure and the path for the OU that you want to
create an object in this is an optional setting if you choose to not put this in
and then it will just go in the computer's container by default and to
be able to see the öyou paths from the objects here you'll have to make sure
that the advanced view is turned on and if it is you can right click on any o
you that you like go to properties go to the attributes editor and you're looking
for the distinguished name and ANF will need everything up to the DC which calls
out your domain name specifically so we need first part here and then you can
just hit join alright and now that that's complete we'll go back to our
capacity pool and click on volume so it's from the volumes itself that we're
provisioning the shares and you can have multiple volumes within a single
capacity pool but don't feel like you have to use all 4 terabytes or one share
although you certainly and but you can break this up into shares
are just right for your particular workloads so I'll click on the volumes
link and then we'll go to add a new volume and I'll call the name of this
volume ANF - FSLogix and now we have to set our quota and this is the volume
size now the smallest sized volume we can create is 100 gigabytes and we can
go up to the maximum size of our capacity pool and I'll just stick with
the minimum at this point we're gonna increase this later and now we need to
select the virtual network in Azure that we're going to create this on and the
reason for this is that we're going to provision these volume into our virtual
network so that we have a private IP to work against though since I already have
a virtual network in Azure I'll select that I don't have a dedicated subnet we
can create one right here I'll call my subnet ANF - subnet and I've already
got my IP range selected and then the subnet delegation is already decided for
us and this is just a normal feature of a subnet to be able to be dedicated to a
particular type of service and we'll hit OK so before I hit next is one other
thing that I'll call out and that's that user-defined routes and network security
groups are not supported against the ANF subnet so the recommendation is if
you need those items in your network that you should apply them on the other
subnets and then you can control traffic flow to the net up volume from those
other subnets I'll click Next now we need to select
our protocol type and we have two options NFS or SMB and in the NFS side
we have the option of two versions NFS three or four point one and you'd
probably want an NFS share if you're dealing more in the Linux world and
support for NFS is in preview right now for Azure Files so if you're
interested in that give me some comments down below and we can create a video on
that so since we're using FSLogix I'll select SMB and it's brought in our
active directory connection or us and we're going to set up the share name
again of ANF - FSLogix we'll click Next and add some appropriate tags and
we've got our cost code as well as our application name of Azure NetApp files
this is the lab environment and it's on the standard tier and we'll hit next so
we can review everything that we've got here
then we'll hit create our volume finished building and you can see from
our virtual network that provisioned in our new ANF subnet we do have a
dedicated network card to connect us to our ANF device back in our a enough
there's our completed volume we can see its name photo protocol of SMB the
mounting path at service level we have and the capacity pool that we belong to
they'll click on the volume and over on the left we have the mounting
instructions and this couldn't be any easier we just click here to copy the
mounting path and we go to a server within our domain and here on my domain
controller you can see the computer object that was created and it's through
that object basically that we're going to tunnel our permissions so that we can
get to our storage frame and I've pulled up the Windows File Explorer and I'll
just paste in the path and hit enter and there we go direct access to ANF without
having to input any other credentials so just create a new folder here and we'll
create a new file within that folder throw some text in there close the file
and I've just copied some other random files onto the share here and now we've
got something to work with the back in Azure over on the left of the volumes
will go to snapshots and then at the top we'll go to add a snapshot and I'll just
call it the initial for April 2020 we'll hit OK and this has done a snapshot of
the entire volume for us and now that we have a snapshot we can do a restore
which we'll come back to in just a moment let's set this up a for FSLogix
now we can certainly map to this file share four FSLogix directly or
optionally like we did with Azure files we can go to our DFS we can right click
on our DFS namespace and add a new folder I'll call this ANF and go to add
a target paste in the path to the ANF share it okay hit OK again back in our
File Explorer I can put in the path now for my DFS arrow pointing at Azure
NetApp files it enter and we can get directly there I can use this path now
to obscure the name of the ANF share if that is something that you want to do
again this is completely optional so now I want to set up FSLogix or my users
profiles I'm going to open up the group policy management console and have
he created a policy here for FSLogix I'll right-click on that and go to edit
and here we'll go to the computer policy we'll go to the administrative templates
and FSLogix that'll open up my profile container now the two E's that we know
that we need is the enabled and the VHD locations so I'm going to modify my VHD
locations from pointing at my EFS chair four FSLogix which goes to Azure files
and I'm gonna replace that with the new a and F share I'll hit OK for that I've
logged into my WB d agent and will run my session desktop and it's loading our
FSLogix profile for Maria Hill and if I pull up the file explorer and go to my
Z Drive which again is my DFS share here's my NetApp files and inside there
amongst the other folders we have a folder here for Maria Hill and there are
our FSLogix profiles now that we're back in NAP files we want to simulate
that Monday morning 9:00 a.m. logon storm and for the amount of users we
have in this hypothetical case the amount of performance we're getting out
of our normally fine 100 gigabytes of capacity is just not cutting it and what
we need to do is we need more IOPS right now so that we can get everybody
on line fast we're going to go up here to resize and the only thing we have to
do is change our quota here from 100 gigabytes and we'll reprovision that for
our maximum of 4 terabytes and hit OK so this is now dynamically increased the
amount of performance that we are able to get through this same volume without
any interruption of service and we'll relaunch our session desktop and that
login took about 10 seconds to get us back to Maria Hill I'll show you one
more thing here I'm gonna take all of these files and I'm just going to do a
delete on those now that I've deleted those files I'll right-click and go to
properties and go to previous versions and here is the snapshot that we took
earlier I'm gonna open that let us select one file here and copy
right to my desktop let me close out of here I want to do a full restore which I
can do directly here in Windows just click the restore and that'll just copy
over all of the files you can see happening here background and our
restore is complete and no harm done though hope you've
enjoyed this brief look at Azure NetApp Files and what it could do for you
and again this is aimed more at the enterprise class workloads so think
about Windows virtual desktop like we showed here today as well as HPC or the
azure kubernetes service and of course SAP and any other time you need high
amounts of capacity or performance so if you thought that this video was good or
learned something new go ahead and click that thumbs up icon and if you know of
somebody who would benefit from this video please feel free to share it with
them and give me some comments down below on any questions that you have or
any suggestions for future videos and while you're down there go ahead and
click that notification bell and the subscribe button if you haven't done
that already and join us here at the Azure Academy
where we're all just trying to help everybody learn all about Azure and we
do have several new series coming up very soon so you don't want to miss
those and if you're looking for something more over here on the right
we've got our latest videos as well as one that we picked out just for you so
that you can keep on learning all about Azure
thanks very much for joining us today and we will see you in the next video
happy learning