Writing a VHD of a Physical Drive Directly to an Azure Blob

Question

Here's my scenario:

The Web site owners want a complete image of their web application that they could play with locally as a virtual hard drive.

There's not enough drive space on the Web site's physical HDD to store the VHD image, so I thought I'd map Azure as a drive and generate the directly VHD there.

I have some doubts as to whether this will work. Can you stream huge amounts of data directly to an Azure Blob without caching it on the physical drive first?

Also, I'm concerned about what to use for mapping the Azure Blob as a drive.  I see several commercial (Gladinet) and community tools for mapping Azure storage as a drive, but I don't see anything official from Microsoft, which is surprising.

Thanks for any advice or pointers,

Ken

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Ken Cox - Microsoft MVP [ASP.NET]

Answer 1

Hi,

You can find more information about mount Azure Blob as Drive from here, find them in "Windows Azure Drive White Paper":

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee924681.aspx

Azure Drive requires cloud local storage in Azure config file, Azure Website feature does not include such thing, so i guess Azure Website feature may not support this scenario, you can consider Cloud Service for achieveing your goal.

Hope this helps.

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