New Windows Azure Migration Content

Question

The guide, Migrating Data-Centric Applications to Windows Azure, provides detailed guidance on how to migrate data-centric applications to Windows Azure Cloud Services, as well as an introduction on how to migrate those same applications to Windows Azure Virtual Machines. By using this guide, you will have the planning process, migration considerations, and prescriptive how to’s needed for a positive migration experience.

This guide captures best practices gleaned from the real-world engagements of CAT and the technical expertise of the SQL Database Content team and will be updated regularly to cover new learnings and additional features.

The full guide is at: Migrating Data-Centric Applications to Windows Azure.

The section on migrating SQL Server databases and migrating data to other data management services such as table, blob, Windows Azure drive is at: Migrating with Windows Azure Cloud Services.

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Karthika [MSFT] This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Answer 1

We need to migrate a large database, having size around 200 GB, to Windows Azure SQL Server 2012 VM. An easiest approach we are thinking to achieve this is:

1- Upload mdf+ldf files to azure storage blob

2- RDP to SQL 2012 VM and download mdf+ldf files from azure storage to VM

3- Attach mdf+ldf files to db using SQL Server management studio in VM

Now questions are:

1- Which tool is best to upload (with auto-resume feature) large data files to blob storage?

2- Should this be uploaded as page blob or block blob?

3- Instead of copying mdf+ldf files to VM can we configure SQL server hosted in Azure VM to use mdf+ldf files stored in blob storage?

 

Answer 2

Hi babarzhr,

Will like to share some information with you, which might help you in deciding

1. I had once used interactive javascript console available with Hadoop on Azure to upload 1 TB of data into my cluster. Not sure if it will be applicable here. For small data Neudesic Storage explorer is good.

2. Each Block blob can contain upto 200GB of data. Page blobs can be as large as 1TB where each page blob is divided into 512 byte pages. So if your data is more than 1TB I would suggest you to go with Block Blob.

I have not understood your third point, do you want to store the mdf ldf files in SQL Server or blob storage?