Shared drive between Azure Virtual Machines
I have just moved my web site to an Azure Virtual Machine and have been up and running since last weekend. So far I'm very happy with the results and looking forward to taking advantage of Azure further in due course.
I do have what would seem to be a pretty common scenario - and, to my surprise, I can't find an obvious solution. I have a couple of VMs - one my primary server and the other which will be suspended and ready to kick in (manually is fine) if the first one has an issue. I backup my web site to Azure Storage (my backup utility supports saving to an Azure blob). That's the good news.
I had assumed that I could somehow mount the storage blob as a drive, therefore effectively having shared storage across the two VMs. However, to my surprise, I haven't found an obvious way to do that. I have found a third party utility (Gladinet Cloud Desktop) but it seems painfully slow. As I say, I admit I just assumed this would be an easy thing to do.
So, stepping back, what is the most straightforward way to access a storage blob from multiple VMs? I really don't want to set up a private network and then set up network file sharing - that seems so old school :) and places a specific dependency on one specific VM.
Any suggestions?
Thanks.
Answer
This is now not just possible, but very easy, and it looks just like a filesystem. Check out the new Azure File Service (in preview as of this writing).
Quoting from the announcement:
"The Azure File service exposes file shares using the standard SMB 2.1 protocol. Applications running in Azure can now easily share files between VMs using standard and familiar file system APIs like ReadFile and WriteFile."
It is better than just an SMB drive, as the announcement goes on to mention:
"In addition, the files can also be accessed at the same time via a REST interface, which opens a variety of hybrid scenarios. Finally, Azure Files is built on the same technology as the Blob, Table, and Queue Services, which means Azure Files is able to leverage the existing availability, durability, scalability, and geo redundancy that is built into our platform."