Mounting a Cloud Drive from Console application

Question

I am trying to mount Cloud Drive from C# console application (Non Azure Environment).  CreateCloudDrive returns CloudDrive object with LocalPath set to null. When I call CreateIfNotExist method on CloudDrive, it fails with ERROR_AZURE_DRIVE_DEV_PATH_NOT_SET.

Is mounting cloud drive from C# console application supported? Please clarify.

I looked at these threads http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/windowsazuredata/thread/c9ffacf4-7464-40df-a842-94d8cb85da04 and http://blogs.msdn.com/b/avkashchauhan/archive/2011/10/07/handling-error-error-azure-drive-dev-path-not-set-when-mounting-a-cloud-drive.aspx. But I wasn't sure if this is a bug or unsupported scenario.

Answer 1

If you're trying to mount a WA Drive from outside Windows Azure (and outside the compute emulator), then this is unsupported.

Answer 2

Azure drives can be mounted only from within azure environment such as in a web. worker or VM role both in windows azure and in emulator. But if you are trying to mount it from outside azure environment, e.g. a non-azure application then it is not supported as Steve mentioned above.

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Answer 3

Thank you Steve and Freaky for the confirmation.

Also making sure "unsupported" means does not work at all :). If there is any unsupported way, please let me know.

I am doing a prototype to setup Mongo DB that uses Blob storage for data persistence. The Blob is stored as a VHD. For reading and writing to Mongo DB from Azure environment (deployed and emulated), we are pointing Mongo DB data directory to a path mouted to a Local Resource using Cloud Drive. This works as expected.

But the role requires configuration data to be present in Mongo DB to start correctly. The config data is dependent on the user who delpoys to Cloud. More over the users who deploys the package do not have Azure environment (Visual Studio and Azure tools). So we were thinking of writing config before deploying Azure package to cloud by moutning the blob from console app. This is where I encountered the issue.

So I guess I should create VHD (so this can be mounted from a Azure role during role startup) that contains the config values and then upload it as a Page Blob to Cloud storage.