Finally I’ve decided that I need to catch up with the rest of the world and start investigating Windows Azure a little more. Armed with my free MSDN Azure subscription I’ve decided to run through the GuestBook sample included in the v1.3 of the Azure SDK.
The online help on MSDN is still a bit confusing, although it is still in beta. I did find myself going backwards and forwards between pages a lot trying to find the one missing piece of information. Still, after a little while my GuestBook application is happily running using the local storage emulator and I can upload and view images all I like.
Everything you need for Azure – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsazure/cc974146.aspx
This is where things start to go wrong.. as I decided to also play around with the beta of the VMRoles. So, getting side-tracked I created my VHD in Hyper-V and installed the Azure Integration Tools, disabled Updates, created the certificates, got the certificate thumbprint ID, etc.. (the certificate part is actually quite interesting as it introduces a lot of new PowerShell bits I hadn’t used before).
Uploading the VM took about 30mins, and most of that was (I assume) the integration into Azure itself as the upload of 7GB took about 4minutes. – http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg465385.aspx
So I decided to publish my GuestBook application to Azure, enabling Remote Desktop etc before doing so, importing certificates into Azure and all looks good so far …
After about 30mins though things start to go a little wrong …
And it’s been sat retrying ever since. Does it ever time out !? I think I might stick to one thing at a time now, get my application deployed then start to play with VMRoles!
March 9th, 2011 at 9:46 am
As an update to this post – information on how to prepare and upload a VHD to Azure : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg466229.aspx