Exam Ref 70-417 Upgrading Your Skills to Windows Server 2012 R2 (2014)

Here are the steps required to deploy a domain controller in Windows Azure after you create a Windows Azure account and log on to the Windows Azure Management Portal at http://manage.windowsazure.com:

1. Add an affinity group. An affinity group is one of the Windows Azure-related concepts that you’re most likely to see on the 70-417 exam. An affinity group is a small physical area within one of the Microsoft data centers (“regions”) in which you can place VMs. Creating an affinity group will reduce latency among any virtual machines you later add to that affinity group.

A. To create an affinity group in the Windows Azure Management Portal, select Settings in the blue menu on the left, select Affinity Groups on the right, and then click Add (“+”) on the bottom menu. These options are highlighted in Figure 4-5.

FIGURE 4-5 The first step to adding a new affinity group

B. When you create a new affinity group, you have to specify a name and the Microsoft regional data center in which you want the affinity group to reside, as shown in Figure 4-6.

FIGURE 4-6 The second step to adding a new affinity group

2. Create a storage account. Before you create the VM in Windows Azure that will act as a domain controller, you need to create a storage account. Storage accounts in Windows Azure define the data redundancy type for the VMs later associated with the account. There are three redundancy options.

Locally Redundant Replication ensures that every VM in the storage account is replicated synchronously to two other nodes in the same data center.

Geo-Redundant Replication adds a second level to this baseline redundancy by performing asynchronous replication to a remote data center hundreds of miles away. At the remote, secondary location, three additional copies of the storage are kept.

Read Access - Geo Redundant Replication is like the Geo-Redundant Replication option, except that the data that is replicated to the remote location is stored as read-only.

A. To create a new storage account in the Windows Azure Management Portal, click Storage in the blue menu on the left. On the bottom menu, click +New, as shown in Figure 4-7.

FIGURE 4-7 The first step to creating a storage account

B. In the menu that expands, select Quick Create. This step opens configuration options on the right, as shown in Figure 4-8. You must then specify a unique URL along with an affinity group and choice of replication.

FIGURE 4-8 The second step to creating a storage account

3. Register a DNS server in Windows Azure. To lay the groundwork for the new virtual network that will contain your domain controller in Windows Azure, you first need to register a DNS server address. The new virtual network will use this DNS server. Later, this same internal IP address will be assigned automatically to the first VM in that virtual network.

A. To register the DNS server address in the Windows Azure Management Portal, select Networks in the blue menu on the left. Then click +New in the menu on the bottom, as shown in Figure 4-9.

FIGURE 4-9 Registering a DNS server through the Networks settings

B. Clicking New expands the bottom menu. When you choose Register DNS Server, configuration options that let you choose the name and address of the server appear on the right, as shown in Figure 4-10.

FIGURE 4-10 Registering a DNS server for a virtual network

4. Create a virtual network. A virtual network assigns IPv4 addressing information to an affinity group. When you create the virtual network, you choose a private IPv4 address space (10.---.---.---, 172.16.---.---, or 192.168.---.---), a maximum VM count (defined by a choice of subnet mask), and a DNS server address you have previously registered. Your virtual network will also include automatically configured subnets. Physical connectivity is automatically configured among the members of each subnet.

To create a new virtual network, select Network in the blue menu on the left in the Windows Azure Management Portal and then click New. In the expanded menu that appears, click Quick Create. This step opens the configuration options for the virtual network, as shown in Figure 4-11.

FIGURE 4-11 Creating a new virtual network in Windows Azure

5. Create a new Windows Server 2012 R2 virtual machine. The previous steps create the foundation for the VM that will act as the domain controller, and now you can finally create that VM and assign it to the virtual network and storage accounts you have previously defined.

A. To begin creating the VM, select Virtual Machines in the blue menu on the left in the Windows Azure Management Portal and then click +New on the bottom menu. In the expanded bottom menu that opens, click From Gallery, as shown in Figure 4-12. (Note that at the time of this writing, if you choose the Quick Create option, the VM is assigned to a new storage account with a randomly-generated name, not to your previously created storage account.)

FIGURE 4-12 The first step to creating a new virtual machine in Windows Azure

B. At this point, you can select Windows Server 2012 R2 from the gallery of operating system options. (You won’t have to install the OS yourself on the new VM.) You will then be given an opportunity to specify a name for the VM, along with an administrator account name and password.

C. Next you will see the page in Figure 4-13. Here is where you can assign the new VM to a virtual network, subnet, and storage account. You will also have to assign the VM to a cloud service, which you can create with a name of your choice. You probably don’t need to understand cloud services for the 70-417 exam, but for now, just know that each cloud service is assigned one public IP address.

FIGURE 4-13 The second step to creating a new virtual machine in Windows Azure

6. Connect to the VM and install the domain controller.

A. After you create the VM, you can connect to it by selecting it in the Windows Azure Management Portal and then clicking Connect. This step opens up a Remote Desktop connection to the VM, and you can then log on to the server and interact with it through its desktop.

B. Once you can connect to the VM, you can proceed with installing the domain controller by following the directions at the beginning of this chapter. However, there is one key difference between installing a domain controller on-premises and in Windows Azure. In Windows Azure,you leave the VM with an automatically assigned address. Believe it or not, all servers in Windows Azure should be configured as DHCP clients. The reason this is possible is that DHCP clients in Windows Azure are given extremely long leases, on the order of 99 years or more. In addition, the first server in a virtual network will be assigned the DNS server address that you registered in step 3, so you have in this sense already chosen the address of the domain controller. That address will not change over the lifetime of the VM as long as you perform maintenance shutdowns of the system from within Windows. If you choose the option to shut down the VM from the Windows Azure Management Portal, however, the DHCP lease will be renewed upon restarting, opening the possibility that the address could change.