In this demonstration, we'll go a bit further with Azure File Sync service.
As you can see,
we're in our storagesyncservice that I created in the previous module,
and on the Overview page, this is a shortcut to my sync groups.
I've created some additional sync groups since last time.
I still have just the one local file server in my Registered servers list.
It's a Windows Server 2022 machine that has the most
recent version of the AFS agent on it.
Let's go over to Sync groups and I'll show you about cloud tiering first of all.
I have a sync group called reports, let's go and inspect its properties,
that's mapping to a file share called reports in my contoso storage account.
And this is a good place to see, first of all,
the resource ID and the storage account name and all of that,
of where the cloud endpoint is,
but you can also see Change Enumeration down there.
That can be particularly useful from a quantitative point of view.
Down here we have our server endpoint, and notice that the path is e:\reports.
That's important if you're going to do cloud tiering.
Let me show you what I mean.
By the way, this is a good report here, this Cloud Tiering report.
When you enable cloud tiering on a server endpoint,
you can see your space savings and what files are cached,
what files are not. And the two policies that I had mentioned earlier
about how the cloud tiering actually behaves, you've got your Volume
Free Space Policy and your Date Policy.
Volume Free Space is going to be a percentage of the volume on which you're
associated shared folder is. It's not the shared folder.
You want to think about the overall size of the volume.
So if the volume were, let's say, 100 GB and you set this to 20,
that's telling Azure File Sync that you always want at least 20 GB
free space and that would adjust the aggressiveness of the file
offloading process up into the cloud.
You can also do a Date Policy, and this says Only cache files that were
accessed or modified within the specified number of days, and by cache we
mean keep a copy of the files on the local registered server as opposed to
being offloaded into the cloud. And you'll find over time, I don't think
it's happened yet in my case because I just set this up, but if we look at
the properties of a file,
one way to quickly eyeball that it's actually been offloaded into tiered
storage is that the size on disk will show up as 0.
Again, another place from a monitoring perspective is right here in the
Server Endpoint Properties we can see the tiering efficiency. Of course, we
can also get to that from Azure Monitor as well.
Now the point here that I wanted to make also with cloud tiering is that
it does not work on system volume, so you'll want to make sure that if
you do plan to do cloud tiering on a share,
that share needs to be not on drive C. Here we can see from a monitoring perspective.