How to Migrate a File Sever to Azure Files | Complete Tutorial

hey everybody Freddie here with another video this time we're going to be focusing on how to migrate an on-prem Windows file server to Azure files so we're going to be focusing primarily on creating the file share on Azure then moving the data to that share we're going to be looking at performance numbers how fast you can write data how fast you can read data so I hope you like this video enjoy it and let's get to it [Music] so there are many reasons why people want to move to the cloud a lot of them is because they don't want to manage Hardware you know there's a server that has been sitting there for a long time and is just collecting dust and as we know that dust is not very good for servers so a lot of times people are looking at a server and they're saying wow this server May Fail and I want to make sure that my files are protected and so they don't want to be dealing with cooling they don't want to be dealing with power outages they don't want to be dealing with a lot of the maintenance upgrades and patches and a lot of those things so migrating to the cloud makes sense so what we're going to do here is we're going to talk about how to migrate to the cloud so in order to do that let's go ahead and go through the Azure file storage requirements what is what is required the first thing you're going to need is an Azure account of course if you don't have that you need to set that up go to Ash portal.assure.com set one up once you have that account that Azure account out then we're going to create what is called an Azure storage account and again we're going to go through this step by step so we're going to go through the Azure storage account creation then after that we're going to set up file shares share one share two and inside of that share typically we would have directories and under inside of those directories we're going to have files just like any other file share just like anything else that you probably have done in the past this is exactly the same thing you're just going to set up a share and then once you have that share you're going to be able to mount it on a computer and then we're going to be start transferring files over so that's the first thing we're going to focus on the next thing we're going to focus on is how do you access that file shape there's two ways to access this new file share one of them is direct Cloud access which means that you're just going to connect to the file share directly from your computer through the cloud and that means that you're going to access it through Port 445 which is an SMB protocol connection so that means that if you have a firewall that that that is in your environment you need to open that up to make sure that the files file firewall is for me to say and the firewall allows that Port you also need a client on the on the computer like a Windows 11 Windows 10 or a Mac or Linux any system needs to have a client version that is greater than 3.0 if you have a Windows 10 or Windows 11 you don't have to worry about it it's already set up by default for you another way to do it is using what is called an Azure file sync Azure file sync what it does is a little bit different there is not a direct access to the cloud in this case the the way that it works is it replicates files from an on-prem server to Azure so you continue using your on-prem server and what the server does is the server replicates the files to Azure that means that this gives you better performance because you're still accessing the files from your local server you're not going directly to the cloud the server is replicating to the cloud so this is another option if you're migrating if you're migrating a server and you don't want to manage a server then the direct access would be the best way but if you need the performance then you probably want to go with Azure file sync that is a that is a better option so what we're going to do now is we're going to go ahead and set up that storage account and we're going to go through the process of creating that file share so as you remember the first step is you have to have an Azure account I'm already logged into my Azure account so if you don't have an account please go to portal.assure.com and sign up for one so what we're going to do is we're going to go ahead and create the next step which is a storage account so go up to the search bar up here and just type Azure storage accounts and you will see it here so you just select it so we're going to create a new account click on create so we're going to create a new account click on create and the first thing is going to ask us is a subscription I already have a subscription called Visual Studio I'm going to use a resource Group that I already have here which is called storage Resource Group if you don't have a resource Group please create one because you're going to need one where you put your storage um account then you have to give it a name I'm going to call it fmd test storage and for the region I'm going to set it up as Central us just because I have everything in central us and the performance I'm going to leave it as a standard general purpose V2 account redundancy redundancy you can do my Geo redundant I'm going to just set it up as a local redundant storage account just because it's a lower cost and it gives me some protection as well the next thing is I'm going to click on next um these things are set up by default which is required um requires secure transfer for rest API um this is for encryption allow enabling Public Access on containers I'm going to allow that in this scenario and install this enable storage account access key as well the minimum version of TLS which is the encryption is going to be 1.2 and permitted scope for copy operations from any storage account which is fine and I'm not going to set up data Lake storage Gen 2 because this is typically for data lake so I'm not going to use it for data Lake blob storage here this one uh this one is the only one that is enabled access tier is hot the axis here is for frequently accessed data if you if you're not going to use this data frequently I would suggest you put it in cool just because it's cheaper but in this case if you're going to use it all the time you want to leave it at hot Azure files enable large file share this one by default the file share is going to be a maximum of five terabytes if you need up to 100 terabytes then you have to enable this box right here so again this is if you need larger than five terabytes otherwise the file storage will be five terabytes maximum so I'm not going to set it up networking enable Public Access from all networks is fine and I'm going to use the Microsoft network routing this routing preference we're not going to go too much into the details of this but what this means is that when the client access this share is going to use the Microsoft network which means that that the client is going to access the entry point that is that is the closest to him or her and then after that that communication is going to transfer through the Microsoft backbone so it's much faster internet routing just means that it's going to go directly to closer to the storage account so it's not going to Traverse the Microsoft backbone so it's it's it's slower typically it's slower all right moving forward data protection I want to talk about data protection a little bit more and what we're going to see here is we're going to see that the first option here is going to be the enable soft delete for blobs and enable soft delete for containers and enable self-delete for file shares so let's go ahead and go into the in this into the soft delete for a minute just because it's it I I believe it's an important topic okay soft delete um what it what it means is that self-delete is enabled at the storage level account so as you can see when we try to set up the storage account is is asking us if we want to enable soft delete for file shares the first thing it's going to ask us is do we want to enable it then the next thing is going to ask us is how long we want to retain the files so that means that file share can be recovered if deleted but not the individual files com the complete container not specific files if you want to enable the recovery of specific files then you need to use Azure backup so that's something to keep in mind the next thing that you need to keep in mind is that the retention period is configured at the creation of the storage account typically but you can change it at any time you can just go into the storage account click on the configuration and you can share you can change that at any point in time you can set it up for one day or up to 365 days it does not work on NFS shares even though it's enabled it does not work so keep that in mind and again the other thing is make sure that you remember that if you want to recover individual files you have to use Azure backup you cannot use soft delete to recover specific files moving forward um enable version there is no versioning and in file share if you need versioning you have to use backup encryption we're going to use the managed the Microsoft managed key okay next thing is going to be tags we're not going to use any tags at the moment so this is the review and we go down to the bottom and we say create okay storage account is created we're going to go to resource and now here is the resource that we just created remember I said that you can enable or disable the the soft delete well you can click you can see here under the overview file service you have large files we did not enable that and we did not set up active directory for this one and soft delete is enabled for seven days you can click on this and you can change it at this point soft delete seven days you can click here and you can pretty much change it to up to 365 days from one day to 365 days so I'm going to leave it at seven days for now maximum capacity as I said is five terabytes by default you can change it to 100 terabytes and the file the file share upgrade is permanent so again if you are going to change this from 5 to 100 you cannot go back you move it to you move it and that's pretty much how it stays okay this is file shares you after you have all these configurations set up you can click on create a new file share and you have to give it a name I'm just going to call it fmd share and in this case it asks you what tier you want you can have transaction optimized hot or cool transaction optimizes for heavy transaction workloads and this is not for what I need because in this case I'm just migrating a server to Azure so I'm just going to say it's going to be hot the performance iops is 1000 egress rate 60 megabytes per second and Ingress is 60 megabytes per second maximum capacity is 5 terabytes and large files is disabled okay so now we can click on create okay so fmd share is created when you click on it it is empty because we haven't we haven't copied anything into it at this point the best thing to do is click on the connect button here and as you can see you have Windows Linux and mac and excuse me and this will give you the the script that you need in order for you to connect so I'm I can just say it's going to be a storage account key I'm going to map the drive a z in this case and I'm going to say show me the script and down here you can see the script and at this point you can say go ahead and copy to clipboard says copied see down here on the bottom right hand corner you can see the copy then you can go into your Windows server and what I'm going to do is I'm going to open Notepad and I'm going to paste this script so you can see it and what it's doing is is the first thing is doing is testing the connection it's just going to say do I have a connection to Port 445 so I'm going to go ahead and copy this and I'm going to open a Powershell script and paste this command this will attempt to connect okay so there was no error so that means that there is a connection so what you can do now is you can select all and copy paste the script and what it'll do is it'll go through and try to connect to the file share it says credential added successfully and it added the Z drive to this location okay at this point if I open this I can see the fmd share which is here and the easiest thing to do is just go to in this case the D drive let's just say I'm going to copy this backup folder and I'm going to paste it in here it's about 449 gigabytes and as you can see the speed it's about 10 megabytes per second so the right like I said right is going to be slower than the read it's going to write to two different locations this is the lrs that we selected which is the local redundant storage which is which means that is redundant within one zone and it's not going to expand multiple regions multiple zones it's just redundant in one zone this is going to take a while it says that it's going to take about 12 hours all right finally that file finished and as you can see that the performance is not that great and this brings us to the next topic which is going to be using not a direct connection to the cloud but having it as a file sync so you have this server on-prem where you connect and then there is a client that synchronizes the files to the cloud that's a much better option it's a much faster option because if you're gonna have this connection direct to the cloud writing large files is going to take a while so we're going to discuss that in a different video but now let's go ahead and look at the read at this point so we're going to minimize this file and I'm just going to copy this to the desktop and it says harmful to your computers that's fine because I know what it is so now we're going to read it and as you can see it started at 16 megabytes per second So reading the file is much faster staying at about 10 megabytes per second the right was was much slower So reading this file is going to take about four minutes the right took about 20 minutes so the reading is much faster well that takes place let's go ahead and look at the at the test at the script that we were given so all it's doing is testing the connection to make sure that you don't have a firewall uh that you have a access to the port 445 which is the SMB protocol and then the next thing is if it succeeds as it says here if it's successful then what it's going to do is going to save the password because we're not using authentication through active directory we're just using a password that is going to give us access to that so what it does is it says fmd's storage file just the path to the share and it uses a user which is called fmd test storage user and it uses this password which is the key in order for you to connect to this storage so as you can see uh creating a share and connecting to a share is not very difficult it's actually very easy performance the right performance is slower than the read performance now if you're going to back up terabytes of data to the cloud if you do it this way it's going to take a long time what I would recommend is that you start with the file sync instead of this direct connection to the cloud I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learned something if there's anything that I missed anything that you would like to add please leave it in the comments down below I always like to hear those comments I always like to read those comments because it makes the videos better and I hope you enjoy and look for the next video which is the file sync until next time take care [Music]

Channel: FreddyDubon

Views: 6,338

Keywords: Azure, azure files, Azure Storage, Azure cloud storage, Cloud Storage, how to migrate server, migrate server, windows server migration, data protection, smb share, azure files complete tutorial, azure files write performance, azure files read performance, azure internet routing, azure microsot routing, azure routing preference, microsoft azure, moving data to the cloud

Id: Au5CdsLyOY0

Length: 18min 54sec (1134 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 23 2022