Deploy SharePoint 2013 in Windows Azure
For most of the people who are into IT of large organizations, it’s easy to learn SharePoint as most of these organizations have right infrastructure along with right software licenses.
But if you are an individual who want’s to learn SharePoint, especially 2013 in private, the options are next to none as everything from hardware to software are prohibitively costly.
Now thanks to Microsoft’s Windows Azure, you have all the things needed to proceed with your learning at relatively low to moderate pricing. Even you get a 30 day trial.
The following are the topics I have covered to get you started and pointers to ponder before starting.
- Setting up in Azure
- Billing
- No more de-provisioning the VMs
- Missing Items
- Pointers
Setting up in Azure
You can visit the link Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services by Keith to deploy a SharePoint 2013 lab environment and even expose the site to internet.
This setup requires the following.
- A Windows Server 2012 based VM for AD
- A SQL Server 2012 based VM for Data
- A SharePoint 2013 Trial based VM for SharePoint 2013 App Server
- A DNS Server
- A Virtual Network
- An affinity group
- A storage account
- Setting your machine (client machine) with Windows Azure PowerShell
You have to note that this environment doesn’t have Visual Studio available for development. But as Keith mentions there is an option to setup a development environment.
If you want to run Visual Studio on a VM within Azure, I’d recommend preparing a new VM in your virtual network from the Windows Server 2012 platform image. You’ll likely want to customize it a bit to act more like a development client environment – check out my prior article at blogs.technet.com/…/step-by-step-building-a-free-windows-8-app-dev-lab-in-the-cloud-with-windows-azure-virtual-machines.aspx for the steps. This article if primarily oriented towards setting up a Windows 8 App Development environment on Azure, but a full copy of Visual Studio with SharePoint development support could easily be substituted at the end of the article instead of using Visual Studio Express.
Hope this helps!
Keith
Billing
At the time of writing this article the charges would be mostly towards the 3 VMs. The following is my assumption.
“When the VM’s are shutdown, the computing for related Cloud Services & storage would not be added.”
Take this with a grain of salt.
Hence the computing will be as following.
- AD – Small VM (1.6GHz CPU, 1.75GB RAM, 225GB Storage) – $0.09/hr (pay as you go)
- SQL Server – Medium VM (2 x 1.6GHz CPU, 3.5GB RAM, 490GB Storage) – $0.225/hr (pay as you go)
- SharePoint 2013 Trial – Large VM (4 x 1.6GHz CPU, 7GB RAM, 1,000GB Storage) – $0.36/hr (pay as you go)
No more de-provisioning the VMs
When Windows Azure was rolled out one of the issue for most of the people was that, even after the VM’s are shutdown, your computing will be accumulated and charged. The reason behind that is, until unless the VMs were de-provisioned, the fabric resources or resources which the VM’s use will be reserved.
Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future. And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges.
Hence user’s use to de-provision the VMs so that they are not charged when the VMs are not in use.
But during the June 2013 TechEd conference an enhancement was rolled out, called “VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped!“
Hence from the time of posting this article, all you need to do was shutdown the VM from Azure Portal instead of running De-Provision PowerShell script and your computing will not be accumulated. That is your VM will be in “Stopped (Deallocated)” status.
But it has some after effects like when the VM is started again it will have new Dynamic IP.
“Deallocated” means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called “Dynamic IPs” or “DIPs” in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started.
Missing Items
CONTOSO\Administrator
In the article “Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” Keith would have not mentioned about creating the user “CONTOSO\Administrator“. Do that at the time of creating the service accounts.
Joining the server to domain contoso.com
In the article “Step-by-Step: Build a FREE SharePoint 2013 Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Infrastructure Services” Keith would have mentioned the DB & SP App servers to be joined with contoso.com.
If you are not a Windows Server administrator or don’t have experience, then you may not know how to join a server to an existing domain.
It’s very simple, read the heading “Change server name or join a domain” at How to perform four common tasks in Windows Server 2012
Pointers
- When you create a VM, make sure you select the right Virtual Network and Storage Account.
- When you delete a VM, it’s associated Virtual Hard disk (VHD) would not be deleted. You have to manually delete it from storage account.
- If you are not able to delete a VHD and get “Error deleting VHD: There is currently a lease on the blob and no lease ID was specified in the request” follow this Microsoft Forum Thread Error deleting VHD
When you visit the above links, don’t forget to go through the comments posted. Those comments have lot of useful queries from various users as well as replies from Keith.
Oh by the way, it took me not more than couple of hours to setup and configure SharePoint 2013 in Windows Azure and it’s awesomely easy. The only thing which took time was SharePoint configuration Wizard. It took nearly 10 minutes!.
So what are you waiting for, start messing with SharePoint 2013 !
