VM role the sequel

After playing some time with the VM Role beta and stumbling upon strange problems, i found out that VM beta was activated on my CTP08 subscription and not on my regular one. In the Windows Azure portal, having the information uncollapsed, it looks like it's active :-)

Anyway, testing with the VM role on a small instance now. Using remote desktop and testing if using VM role as a replacement for my own local VM images running in our own datacenter is appropriate. So far, it's looking good. The only thing is: we are running stateless. This means that information that needs to be stored should be stored in a cloudway and not to disk or other local options. Use Azure Drive, TFS hosted somewhere, skydrive, dropbox or other cloudservices that let you save information in a reliable way. Saving your work, while running a VM role, on the C: drive might cause a serious loss of the role gets recycled or crashes and it brought up somewhere else (with yet another c: drive). Although the VM role was never invented for being pure IaaS, it's still a nice alternative that can be very usefull in some scenarios.

We'll continue and make some nice differencing disks with specific tools for specific users (developers, testers, desktop workers etc.) and see how it will work. Developing using VS2010 on a 8 core cloudy thing with 14 gig of internal memory is a blessing. Having your sources stored on Azure drive or alternatives and directly connect to your TFS environment by using Azure Connect combines the best of all worlds and gives you a flexible, cost effective but most of all quick way of setting up images and also tearing them down fast.....

VM Role considerations

After experimenting a lot getting the VM role to work a few considerations:

- Take some time (a lot of time actually) to prepare your image and follow all prerequisites on http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg465398.aspx. Two important steps to take: build a base image VHD which will be the parent of all your other differencing disks. Differencing disks contain the specific characteristics of the VM role to upload and run. Typically you won't run your base VHD (it's just W2008R2) but it's the differencing disks that have the value add. Think of a development environment containing Visual Studio and other tools for your developers and/or architects, a specific VHD for testers having the test version of VS2010 installed, desktop environments with just Office tooling etc.
- don't bother trying to upload your sysprep'd W2008R2 VHD from Windows 7 :-)
For some reasons after creating the VHD with all the necessary tools on it, the csupload still causes some Hyper-V magic to happen. The thing is, Hyper-V magic is not on Windows 7.
- Use the Set-Connection switch of the csupload app to set a "global" connection, written to disk, in your command session and take it from there.
- We started struggling from here concerning the actual csupload. The following message was displayed:



It tells me that the subscription doesn't have the VM role Beta enabled yet. The things is....i did!



I'll just continue the struggle and get it to work....if you have suggestions please let me know, here or on twitter @riccardobecker.