Windows Admin Center: Create Azure VM on the fly

Hey folks. Ned Pyle here again. Today I’m going to talk about a new option for storage replica when you’re using Windows Admin Center, and that’s the ability to deploy new Azure VMs on the fly as you’re setting up an initial sync partner for asynchronous block replication. So it’s a lot of complex stuff. What I’m basically saying is rather than you provisioning your own server and building the whole thing and some other site, you can use Azure now to protect your workloads with storage replica and deploy the whole thing with the push of a button. Let’s see what that looks like right now. So here I am inside of storage replica inside Windows Admin Center and I’m clicking “New” to add a new partnership. Now, notice this new option I have here. I can choose a new Azure VM rather than simply choosing an existing server that I’ve already built. Now, it’s filled in here, this is the source of replication, there’s a storage replica.

01:03 - So I’ve gone ahead and it’s automatically shown me the machine I’m connected to storage, I’ve picked it. Now the Azure portion is going to fire up. So you see this screen that should look very familiar to somebody who’s used the Azure portal in the past, but I am inside Windows Admin Center. So I have got a subscription and a resource group, I’m typing a VM name here, which is definitely true, and I’ll pick our region, in this case it’s going to be US West Two, and it’s going to pick the operating system that I need to use automatically because it knows we’re doing storage replica for my 2019 machine. So now I’m entering some local credentials just to be able to manage this machine going forward, and notice how it’s checking in my password complexity rules and such to make sure they match up with Azure, matches next.

01:53 - Notice here how it’s shown me only a few VMs. That’s because it’s trying to size it to match my source storage replica server that I had On-Prem. I can see filters here, I can see all the sizes. This basically is just trying to match up fairly close VM sizing to match where it’s coming from so that if a storage replica ever had to fail over, you wouldn’t see too much difference in scale performance. So in the next disk, I can see it’s automatically populated my storage for me.

02:25 - Storage replica needs this disk to be perfectly matching at the file system to match it, everything has to match and it’s done that for me. Then it tends to join the domain. Storage replica requires domain join. So rather than making you go and take care of all this later on after permission to the VM, we can do it right here. Something you can’t do with the Azure portal. By putting some credentials from the domain, and I’m going to click “Next Networking.” You can see here that I’ve already got my network interfaces all set up, a gateways and sub-nets to choose from for my VPN connections so I can do this replication.

03:01 - At least I can express route here in Azure express route, and we can check everything to create. Now, you’ll start seeing the process of a VM generating in Azure on the fly in the middle of me setting up my storage replica workload. So it’s creating this, creating network interfaces, it’s creating the VM, it’s joining the domain. Let’s try to compress this so we don’t sit around waiting for all of this stuff to happen. But I never had to go and post-processing machine, I never had to install the storage replica feature, I never had to take care of any of these things that I would have done in Azure, and I would’ve done also if I was using an On-Premise server. I can come and go from this experience.

03:43 - This is all running through rest APIs that we send from Admin Center into Azure. It’s entirely asynchronous. But it’s all done creating the VM, and now, there is my net is awesome VM that was created. I need to give it some storage replica replication group, and notice how the storage is already set up, provisioned, mashed up. So all I have to do is just go, and now we’re in the storage replica initial sync part, we’re done messing around with Azure. We will see the initial sync start to Azure, it’s done automatically asynchronous, because there’s no world we’re going to be able to get, legitimately good latency across the country to some remote Azure data-centers as we started synchronously here. You can see it’s all running.

04:30 - I’m going try and compress this while it does initial block copy of SAR, and when it’s all done, my On-Premises workload is protected by my Azure VM and I’m good to go. >> So that was the demo. As you can see, the experience is very similar to when you’re just deploying your own regular server, you have done in the past and now use a button to push and a few options to check, and suddenly you’ve got your own extra site provided by highly available never going to go away Azure data centers. For more information, there’s a URL on the screen. Good luck and have fun. .