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Connecting Windows Server 2016 with Azure

Into the Blue

Article from ADMIN 43/2018

By Thomas Joos

Microsoft continues to integrate Windows Server with the Azure cloud. With Cloud Witness and the RDS Connection Broker, you can operate distributed environments more reliably and efficiently, and SQL databases migrate sensibly into the cloud.

Under Windows Server 2016, you can now set up witness servers (Cloud Witness) for Windows clusters in the Microsoft cloud, as well as the Connection Broker for Remote Desktop Services (RDS), which means you can link up multiple data centers for highly available and powerful servers and clusters. You don't have to rely on virtual machines (VMs) with Windows Server 2016 in the cloud; instead, you can lease their functionality as a service in Azure itself. Now it is also possible to install Windows Server 2016 in Azure. The cloud service allows you to install VMs based on Server 2016 and connect them to each other through virtual networks or to the local network to create a hybrid cloud that supports Windows Server 2016 features. Such a cloud could be managed with System Center Virtual Machine Manager, for example.

Connecting Server 2016 to Azure makes sense if a cluster extends across multiple data centers. In this case, Cloud Witness can stabilize and significantly influence the management of the quorum. Such clusters are used in Windows Server 2016, for example, with the new Storage Spaces Direct (see the article on S2D in this issue) and Storage Replica. In such a scenario, the local volumes of the cluster nodes are combined into a virtual storage location replicated between data centers by Storage Replica. In this way, Hyper-V could be operated in a geocluster with high availability. Cloud Witness is therefore predestined for high availability.

In addition to the active options available for connecting Windows Server 2016 to the Microsoft Azure cloud, a considerable amount of Azure lies behind the scenes of the operating system. The network stack and the functions relating software-defined storage (e.g., S2D and Storage Replica) are well known from Azure. Technologies such as Azure Site Recovery to replicate VMs in Microsoft Azure or Azure Backup to back up entire servers to the cloud are also included. Although they are currently not available for

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