We can go over to Resources, and we can verify what's happening here.
So notice that it says Server Name and then there is an IP address.
So it's like you're highly available file share is represented as a
server and we can see under File Server that that new file share is going
to be advertised under that virtual host name.
So if I do a Run prompt, let me bring this out here,
and do a \\az801fs,
I now have this highly available file share and I can populate it,
make drive mappings whatever, and it's going to that location.
And if we quickly detour over into Active Directory Users
and Computers in our computers container,
we can see a number of failover cluster virtual network name accounts,
including az801fs.
So each of your roles will be represented as a virtual server in AD,
and that also means, of course, if we look in DNS,
we've got a host record for that.
Let's see, here is 88 right here, az801fs.
See how that works.
Alright, let's try this one more time.
Roles, Configure Role, File Server, and this time,
let's assume that we want to do either failover clustering with
SQL Server or we want to do highly available VMs using scale out
file server for application data.
We give it a name, I'll call this az801sofs,
and notice that that's all that's being asked here.
So what we can do after the fact is review,
let's click Finish, we'll select the scale out file server resource,
and then we can come down and check it out.
So it is available under that host name as we saw before,
Distributed Server Name, Shares, it's going into cluster shared volume,
so it's simple as that really.
Now for each of your clustered roles,
they're going to have their own different unique properties to an extent.
I mean, the virtual machine, of course,
is going to have a completely separate set of
properties than a file share or file server,
but there are some things that are quite the same.
Let me show you what I mean.
Let me right‑click our traditional file share and this is a
big exam alert you need to know about.
Remember that when we create one of these highly available roles,
there is going to be with the absence of SOFS,
which is active, active.
The rest of them are going to be an active passive
situation where there is an owner node,
you can see that right here in the property,
and even the scale out file servers are listed as having an owner, and
you can specify a preferred owner if you want to anchor that role
permanently as a default failback location.
You see what I mean?
And so the idea here is that you can reorder and enable/disable that preferred
owners list from the Properties General tab as you can see.
And then also, importantly,
you can specify whether you want failback to take place.
In other words, if we have an event, right here,
this file server is on owner node mem2, if we right‑click and we do a move,
let's select node and move it to mem1,
that should take just a moment to complete.
Let's say that mem2 was going to go down for some routine
maintenance so we're going to want to manually move that
role to the other as its owner.
The question is going to be once we've fixed whatever issue is going on mem2,
how do we bring that role back?
Do we want it to automatically take place?
That's the concept of failback.
So now we can see that mem1 is now the owner.
So that property I was talking about here is if we go to failover,
notice that it's set by default to prevent failback,
if you want to go back to that preferred node or the
highest priority available preferred node,
you want to make sure to allow,
and that way when we bring the node back online when
we take it out of maintenance mode,
that role will automatically go back to the preferred node,
so it's important that you understand that control,
alright?
Okay, so enough about local.
Let's go out to Azure now to finish this demo up,
and I have an environment configured here.
Let me see how I want to start this.
I have an always on availability group cluster
configured in my Azure environment.
First of all,
I need to start some VMs because it looks like several of
them that I need are not actually running.
Again, this is good practice for using virtual machines,
Windows Server virtual machines in Azure,
I'm going to start them all up as a group as you can see.
And let me see, let me quickly figure out what's going on here.
So we've got sqlserver‑0 and sqlserver‑1.
So we've got two cluster nodes that are running SQL Server and
are already configured for an always on group.
What I want to do is take a look at the network,
so let's figure out what network we're on here.
It looks like we've got him on this autohav2VNETen2 network.
What a crazy name.
And something I like to do just to get my sea legs as it were in terms of
what's happening is look at the diagram just to take a look from a bird's eye
perspective exactly how is this topology set up.
So let's walk through it here.
It looks like we've got two subnets,
a static subnet that contains Active Directory,
we've got two domain controllers here,
and then we have a SQL subnet where we have,
it looks like two cluster nodes and it looks like we have
a file share witness machine as well,
and then we can see our internal sqlLoadBalancer that has
a front end private IP address and its routing traffic to
sqlserver‑0 and sqlserver‑1.
Well let's click into that general purpose load balancer.
By the way, if you want to go deeper on this stuff,
we have plenty of courses in the Pluralsight library that
cover the Azure load balancing options,
we have plenty of SQL Server and Azure SQL Server training,
I did quite a bit myself, as a matter of fact,
so I just wanted to give that shout out.
Now this configuration is manual, I need you to understand that.
So as a planning step,
you need to make sure to reserve a private IP address that you want to share
between the load balancers front end and the always on.
So I'm obviously using 10.0.1.9, and I've configured that
as the front end of this load balancer.
So note that address well, 10.0.1.9.
If we come down to the Load Balancing Rules,
we've got a rule here, let's take a look at its properties,
that says if traffic is coming in on IPv4 to that front end,
then forward the traffic to our backend nodes,
those two SQL Server virtual machines, don't do any port mapping,
evidently the source request is going to be TCP 1433,
and we want to keep it that way.
The health probe we've defined is doing a TCP port test.
This is a way for the load balancer to ensure that the
backend nodes are online and available.
The other thing here is this floating IP.
As I said, it's just a simple radio button type control,
it's either on or off,
and we absolutely want to make sure that it's on in this case.
Alright, so let's come back to our VMs,
and let's sign into one of those SQL Server VMs.
Let's go to Connect, and hopefully I have a Bastion, my fingers are crossed.
It looks like I don't.
Well,
a Bastion is a managed jump host that runs in Azure and the
Microsoft engineering team has done a lot of good work to try to
make Bastion deployment as easy as possible.
Notice that all I had to do was click the one button,
and behind the scenes what's happening is in the
virtual network that this machine is on,
I can actually show you if we go back to that autohav network,
and if we come down to Diagram again.
In order to use Bastion, Bastion needs its own reserved subnet,
and it has a reserved name label as well,
Azure Bastion subnet.
So it looks like the automation built into the portal deployed
the subnet for us and is now deploying really,
it's just a managed appliance,
there is not a whole lot you can do with the Bastion,
but what it gives you is really nice turnkey connectivity
using either remote desktop protocol to manage Windows VMs or
Secure Shell to manage Linux VMs,
and you never have to expose your VMs to the internet directly.
This is the value proposition of the Bastion.
You're coming into the Bastion on TCP 443 with a TLS SSL encrypted connection.
Okay,
so it's going to take a little while for the Bastion to finish provisioning.
So let's, in the meantime, go back to SQL Server 0 and let me go back to Connect,
Bastion, and you don't have to worry about this, but I have to hurry up and wait.