Azure and Microsoft Windows Insider Server Cloud Blog
Author: Robert Smit [MVP]
Robert Smit is Senior Technical Evangelist and is a current Microsoft MVP in Clustering as of 2009.
Robert has over 20 years experience in IT with experience in the educational, health-care and finance industries.
Robert’s past IT experience in the trenches of IT gives him the knowledge and insight that allows him to communicate effectively with IT professionals
who are trying to address real concerns around business continuity, disaster recovery and regulatory compliance issues. Robert holds the following certifications:
MCT - Microsoft Certified Trainer, MCTS - Windows Server Virtualization, MCSE, MCSA and MCPS. He is an active participant in the Microsoft newsgroup community and is currently focused on Hyper-V, Failover Clustering, SQL Server, Azure and all things related to Cloud Computing and Infrastructure Optimalization.
Follow Robert on Twitter @ClusterMVP
Or follow his blog http://robertsmit.wordpress.com
Linkedin Profile Http://nl.linkedin.com/in/robertsmit
Robert is also capable of transferring his knowledge to others which is a rare feature in the field of IT. He makes a point of not only solving issues but also of giving on the job training of his colleagues.
A customer says " Robert has been a big influence on our technical staff and I have to come to know him as a brilliant specialist concerning Microsoft Products. He was Capable with his in-depth knowledge of Microsoft products to troubleshoot problems and develop our infrastructure to a higher level. I would certainly hire him again in the future. "
Details of the Recommendation: "I have been coordinating with Robert implementing a very complex system. Although he was primarily a Microsoft infrastructure specialist; he was able to understand and debug .Net based complext Windows applications and websites. His input to improve performance of applications proved very helpful for the success of our project
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When moving to Azure or building new infrastructure workloads latency is important and where do I find the numbers of how do I configure it for the best and what is the difference between Azure Availability groups or Azure Availability zones or do I need Azure Site Recovery. Well as a Consultant IT depends.
Availability Sets
Availability Sets takes the virtual machine and configures multiple copies of it. Each copy is isolated within a separate physical server, compute rack, storage units and network switches within a single datacentre within an Azure Region.
When you create your virtual machine you can specify the Availability Set, you can’t change it or move it in or out of an Availability Set after creation. If you wanted to make changes you would need to start again and recreate the virtual machine. Availability Sets only apply to virtual machines, they can’t be used for any other type of resource within Azure. So Local Datacenter redundancy.
Availability Zone
The next level of availability for your virtual machines within Azure is Availability Zones. With Availability Zones utilized your acceptable downtime a month moves to less than 5 minutes as you’ve got a 99.99% SLA.With Availability Zones you are starting to use zone aware services. Your workload will be spread out across the different zones that make up an Azure region. An Azure region is made up of multiple datacenters and each zone is made up of one or more datacenters. Each datacenter is equipped with independent power, cooling and networking.
You Can imaging when using this there could be some extra latency between the VM’s it all depends on the zone where you are deploying this but that can be tested .
In the next setup I use a Azure VM both in west europe and we test the latency in the same region between vm’s. The tool I use is Latte
On the Server sender we placed the remote receiver IP
Here on the receiver we use the local vm IP and after the test the latency is shown. this is a common setup. If we want to improve this or to make sure that these numbers are not getting worse we need to change the setup.
516 Latency(usec)
When running SAP latency is important, Azure has an option that is called Proximity placement groups. An Azure proximity placement group is a logical construct. When a proximity placement group is defined, it’s bound to an Azure region and an Azure resource group.
A single Azure resource group can have multiple proximity placement groups assigned to it. But a proximity placement group can be assigned to only one Azure resource group.
Proximity placement groups offer co-location in the same data center. However, because proximity placement groups represent an additional deployment constraint, allocation failures can occur (for example, you may not be able to place your Azure Virtual Machines in the same proximity placement group.)
When you ask for the first virtual machine in the proximity placement group, the data center is automatically selected. In some cases, a second request for a different virtual machine SKU may fail since it does not exist in the data center already selected. In this case, an OverconstrainedAllocationRequest error will be returned. To troubleshoot, please check to see which virtual machines are available in the chosen region or zone using the Azure portal or APIs. If all of the desired SKUs are available, try changing the order in which you deploy them.
In the case of elastic deployments, which scale out, having a proximity placement group constraint on your deployment may result in a failure to satisfy the request.
If you want to use availability zones together with placement groups, you need to make sure that the VMs in the placement group are also all in the same availability zone.
In this sample we gona make an Azure proximity placement group and place Two VM’s in it As an sample I also use a Azure Virtual desktop machine
How to create an Azure proximity placement group, In the azure portal type proxi and the Azure proximity placement group are there.
Select Create , add resource group and pick a name that fits your name convention
Add some tags and that is all or do this in powershell
Adding a VM to the new created Azure proximity placement group is selecting the configuration of the VM and add it to the VM. In my case I have an availability set added to my VM. So I must upgrade the entire Availability set to add the Azure proximity placement group
Now that we added the Azure proximity placement group to the VM we need to run the same test again.
Both machines are already in the same availability set that is now added with the Azure proximity placement group
testing from outside the avail from a B2 vm to a D2v3 sku
running this on a d4ds_4 as this is in the av set I need to choose what is in the limit of this set so bound to the VM sku
as you can see it really depends vm sku type what kind of latency you will get but basically it is lower when you are using Azure proximity placement groups
Interesting to see in the PowerShell commands from the Azure proximity placement groups there is also an ultra section, this is currently in preview but can give you even better results but keep in mind you can’t fix it with just one setting check your chain and fix that instead of fixing just one link.
-ProximityPlacementGroupType
Specifies the type of the proximity placement group. Possible values are: Standard or Ultra
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This is the first post in the new layout, personally I think I will change it again as the text frame is to small, but let me know your thoughts
When migration machines to Azure or to a different OS You will often face all kinds of errors and issues. that you think why and that is an old message and didn’t I do this already. Well In the AD there is also dfsrmig.exe yes the DFS migration tool in the old days you had only FRS for the sysvol folder replication. But If you have still a FRS than you can’t join a Windows server 2022 domain controller. In the following steps I’ll show you how to do this. I had to build a server 2003 domain again(painfull)
Joining a Windows server domain controller to a old 2000 domain it will fail.
Windows functional level and domain level are on windows 2000. We need to raise the DFL and the FFL .
Going to the new ADPrep and it fill be fixed, as I had a greenfield AD site some items maybe different in the production site.
Now that the DFL is 2008 we can go the the next phase.
Windows Server 2003 and 2003 R2 uses File Replication Service (FRS) to replicate SYSVOL folder content to other domain controllers. But Windows server 2008 and later are using Distributed File System (DFS) for the replication. DFS is better than FRS.
The dfsrmig.exe tool is supported only on domain controllers which are running in the Windows Server 2008 domain functional level DFL. This is because SYSVOL migration from FRS replication to the DFS Replication service is possible only on domain controllers running in the Windows Server 2008 domain functional level.
In the overview you can see all the options that can be used in the dfsrmig tool.
dfsrmig.exe /GetGlobalState
Now we can see the levels of the domain, and we raise the level , keep in mind a reboot is needed it is not mentioned but you need a reboot of the domain controllers.
Running the tool will give you the required information
The current domain functional level is not at least Windows Server 2008.
DFSRMig is only supported on at least Windows Server 2008 level domains.
PS C:\Users\Administrator> dfsrmig.exe /GetGlobalState
DFSR migration has not yet initialized. To start migration please
set global state to desired value.PS C:\Users\Administrator>
Global Migration States
0
‘START’ state
1
‘PREPARED’ state
2
‘REDIRECTED’ state
3
‘ELIMINATED’ state
In the 4 steps we gona transfer the FRS in DFS
dfsrmig.exe /setGlobalState 1
dfsrmig /getmigrationstate
When it is ready, we can check and go to the next step.
dfsrmig /setglobalstate 2
Type dfsrmig /getmigrationstate to confirm all domain controllers have reached redirected state. every step can be checked with the /getmigration state.
We can set the next step 3 dfsrmig /setglobalstate 3
After these steps we can check if all domain controllers are changed, remember this can take some time when you have multiple domain controllers and long replication schedules.
Checking the migration state is the best way to see if it has finished. dfsrmig /getmigrationstate to confirm all domain controllers have reached eliminated state
Checking the proper state can be done with the sysvol share. This completes the migration.
Here are the before and after status.
Also make sure in each domain controller FRS service is stopped and disabled.
Now it should all be good
Now the domain join should work.
Got another error warning.
Verification of replica failed. The forest functional level is not supported
Let me get the Ad info get-adforest
As you can see the forest mode is still windows2000forest so we need to raise this. In domain and trust we can set this.
Now that everything is fixed we can add a new Windows server 2022 domain controller to the existing domain.
During some events on the blog I need to redo some work. in the next x time this will be fixed.
Little update here, seems my WordPress theme was no longer supported, good time to start with a fresh setup. Still struggling on what to place or not.
let me know if you have suggestions if you find links that are not working place it in the comment and I will try to fix them as quick as I can.
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Robert Smit MVP Blog 