Upgrading from Windows Azure Websites Update 4 to Update 6 with SQL Server Standard

As you may have known, Windows Azure Websites installations that uses SQL Server Standard Edition for data storage will have issues getting updated to Update 6 as the SQL scripts included in this update used SQL Server Enterprise Edition specific features. I’ve reported this issue to Microsoft on the Windows Azure Pack forums and have privately conversed with a few people inside Microsoft who are responsible for the Azure Pack Websites product following the public post.

Continue reading “Upgrading from Windows Azure Websites Update 4 to Update 6 with SQL Server Standard”

Changing the php.ini File for Web Workers in Windows Azure Pack Websites v2

As some of you may have noticed with Windows Azure Pack Websites v2, you can have the user to specify certain settings inside the .user.ini file if they want to enable fancy PHP options.

However, what if you want to make those changes applied globally to all of your tenant’s web sites by default? Doing some quick Google searches leads you to a dead end. However I accidentally discovered this trick when I was upgrading a lab web farm from Update 4 to Update 6.

Continue reading “Changing the php.ini File for Web Workers in Windows Azure Pack Websites v2”

Cleaning up a MS SQL Server after Windows Azure Pack Websites v2 was Previously Installed

As most people will have known this working with a Windows Azure Pack Web Farm lab environment, cleaning up the data can be a pain since the installer refuses to continue if any databases containing Windows Azure Pack Websites v2 data.

You can easily fix this by running these queries:

drop database [Hosting];
drop database [ResourceMetering];
drop login Hosting_FileServer;
drop login Hosting_HostingAdmin;
drop login Hosting_LoadBalancer;
drop login Hosting_Operations;
drop login Hosting_Publisher;
drop login ResourceMetering;
drop login ResourceMetering_Operations;

That should clean up the database server so a new instance of Websites can be installed on that database server.

Windows Azure Pack Update Rollup 5

This morning Microsoft pushed out update KB3023209 out to the Updates channel. This update is meant for systems running Windows Azure Pack in their private cloud.

The full text of the update is as follows:

This update contains functionality fixes. Among them are: 1) Support for SQL Resource Governor in the SQL Server Resource Provider. 2) Admin support for disabling native Virtual Network Extension to allow for 3rd Party Network Providers. 3) Provide detail on VM Memory type, Memory Startup and Maximum values in the Tenant Portal. 4) Fix to the Get-MgmtSvcRelyingPartySettings PowerShell cmdlet. 5) Fix to the issue of failing to establish an RDC (Remote Desktop Connection) to VMs placed behind a NAT. 6) Fix to the “Attached Network” dialog in the Virtual Machines Extension where the network entries in the list were disabled. 7) Support for increasing capacity of SQL hosting server in WAP.

For clouds that also run Windows Azure Pack Web Sites v2, sorry there aren’t any updates on that for this rollup release.

As always when it comes to applying this update – You gotta bring down all of the machines that serve out Windows Azure Pack before installing the update – you don’t want your tenants messing up things while you’re applying updates.

Adding a New Linux Distribution on System Center VMM 2012 R2’s list of Operating Systems

For hosters who use Windows Azure Pack along with System Center VMM 2012 R2, they might find that sometimes they need to support a XYZ Linux distribution for their customers. However they’ll quickly find they can’t get that distribution to display correctly on the Azure Portal as the only option to choose is “Other Linux”. Here’s a SQL query that anybody can use to inject a custom Operating System into VMM’s database:

USE [VirtualManagerDB]
GO

INSERT INTO [dbo].[tbl_IL_OS]
([OSId]
,[Name]
,[Description]
,[Architecture]
,[OSFlags]
,[VMWareGuestId]
,[OSType])
VALUES
('EBAB54C0-A9FA-4A3F-A21C-94775B96A6E5' /* Generate UUID */
,'Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)' /* Limited to 64 Chars */
,'Debian GNU/Linux 6 (64-bit)' /* Longer description of Linux Distro */
,'amd64' /* Use x86 for i386, amd64 for x86_64 */
,'28' /* This remains constant */
,'otherLinux64Guest' /* This is meant for VMware, go lookup the VMX spec files for this value */
,'1') /* Leave this at one, that's what the other OSes looked like */
GO

If you installed VMM 2012 R2 with a different SQL database name, adjust the USE statement accordingly.