Hyperledger Fabric on Azure Kubernetes Service Marketplace template

Customers exploring blockchain for their applications and solutions typically start with a prototype or proof of concept effort with a blockchain technology before they get to build, pilot, and production rollout. During the latter stages, apart from the ease of deployment, there is an expectation of flexibility in the configuration in terms of the number of blockchain members in the consortium, size and number of nodes and ease in management post-deployment.

We are sharing the release of a new Hyperledger Fabric on Azure Kubernetes Service marketplace template in preview. Any user with minimal knowledge of Azure or Hyperledger Fabric can now set up a blockchain consortium on Azure using this solution template by providing few basic input parameters.

This template helps the customers to deploy Hyperledger Fabric (HLF) network on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters in a modular manner, that meets the much-required customization with regard to the choice of Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine series, number of nodes, fault-tolerance, etc. Azure Kubernetes Service provides enterprise-grade security and governance, making the deployment and management of containerized application easy. Customers anticipate leveraging the native Kubernetes tools for the management plane operations of the infrastructure and call Hyperledger Fabric APIs or Hyperledger Fabric client software development kit for the data plane workflows.

The template has various configurable parameters that make it suitable for production-grade deployment of Hyperledger Fabric network components.

Top features of Hyperledger Fabric on Azure Kubernetes Service template are:

• Supports deployment of Hyperledger Fabric version 1.4.4 (LTS).
• Supports deployment of orderer organization and peer nodes with the option to configure the number of nodes.
• Supports Fabric Certificate Authority (CA) with self-signed certificates by default, and an option to upload organization-specific root certificates to initialize the Fabric CA.
• Supports running of LevelDb and CouchDB for world state database on peer nodes.
• Ordering service runs highly available RAFT based consensus algorithm, with an option to choose 3,5, or 7 nodes.  
• Supports ways to configure in terms of number and size of the nodes of Azure Kubernetes Clusters.
• Public IP exposed for each AKS cluster deployed for networking with other organizations
• Enables you to jump start with building your network sample scripts to help post-deployment steps such as create workflows of consortiums and channels, adding peer nodes to the channel, etc.
• Node.js application sample to support running a few native Hyperledger Fabric APIs such as new user identity generation, running custom chain code, etc.

Source: azure.microsoft.com

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Azure Stack laaS – part two

Start with what you already have

Every organization has a unique journey to the cloud. This journey is based on the organization’s history, business specifics, culture, and maybe most importantly, their starting point. While it can be hard for some to say goodbye to their current virtualization environment and way of doing things, the journey to the cloud provides many options, features, functionalities, and opportunities to improve existing governance, operations, and implement new ones. The journey to the cloud can also provide the opportunity to redesign applications and take advantage of the cloud architecture. Additionally, Microsoft Azure gives you the option to host your virtual machines (VMs) in the public cloud or in your own facility with Azure Stack.

In most cases, this journey starts with a lift and shift of the existing servers, either virtual machines or physical servers. Because Azure Stack at its core is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform, the right way to think about this first phase of the journey is as a lift and optimize process. Moving the servers should be the first step towards enabling modern operations across your workloads. That could mean something as little as selecting the right size for your VMs so that you “pay for what you use,” enabling self-service by doing it yourself, automating deployments, or even building on the success of others.

What to think about when migrating

The Azure migration center provides a good model to help start the assessment, make sure you have the right stakeholders involved and help create the proper frame for your migration.

As you start this assessment, there are several factors which you can use to identify what is the best suited platform for your workload, whether that is Azure or Azure Stack:

◈ Cost
◈ Connectivity requirements
◈ Potential regulations and data gravity requirements
◈ High availability and regional requirements

After you complete the assessment and planning, you will need to select the right tool for the migration.

Our partner ecosystem includes ISVs that have built solutions which range from simple migrations, to “as a Service” solutions. There are also Microsoft migration options which require manual steps to implement, but offer a potential lower cost.

Partner options

Azure Stack has ISV solutions for every stage of application migration, from envisioning and/or discovery, to modernization by leveraging PaaS capabilities. Each have their own capabilities and improve the process in their own way.

◉ Carbonite – Offers server migration, backup, high availability of Windows Servers, and enterprise protection for Microsoft Windows endpoints.

◉ Cloudbase – Offers a migration-as-a-service solution called Coriolis which integrates with Azure Migrate and uses it for the initial assessment, as well as the VM-size mapping.

     ◉ Coriolis will be available as a trial version in the Azure Stack Marketplace, offering free VM migrations to validate the process and make sure it is the right solution. 

◉ Commvault – Complements migration, management, protection, and activation of data on Microsoft Azure Stack and other hybrid cloud infrastructure solutions. Commvault helps enterprises increase agility, reduce costs, and discover valuable insights.

     ◉ Commvault is available in the Azure Stack Marketplace and it offers a 60-day free trial that can be upgraded in place to a full version.   

◉ Corent – Offers a migration-as-a-service solution. See below for published cases studies:

     ◉ “Migrating a BFSI(Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) Application to Microsoft Azure Stack using SurPaaS MaaS”     

     ◉ “Calligo delivers successful migration to Azure Stack using Corent Technology SurPaaS platform”

     ◉ Corent Technology is offering a free POC of scanning and migrating of up to five VMs to readers of this blog.  Email sales@corenttech.com with #AzureStackBlog to set up your free PoC. 

◉ ZeroDown – Provides business continuity and high availability across multiple stamps, and even during a migration process. 

◉ This isn’t really a migration tool, instead it can offer fault tolerance and high availability for your solution.     

     ◉ This solution can also help with creating fault tolerance and high availability across multiple stamps. 

     ◉ It is also available in the Azure Stack Marketplace and offers a 30-day free trial   

Microsoft migration options

The Storage Migration Service makes it easier to migrate servers and to target VMs in Azure Stack. You can use the graphical tool that inventories data on servers and then transfer that data and configuration to the VMs already deployed on Azure Stack. The service works without apps or users having to change anything. Depending on the assessment, some of these workloads might go to Azure IaaS, or Azure Files.

Use Storage Migration Service because you've got a server or lots of servers that you want to migrate to Azure Stack virtual machines. Storage Migration Service is designed to help by doing the following:

◈ Inventory multiple servers and their data.

◈ Rapidly transfer files, file shares, and security configuration from the source servers.

◈ Optionally take over the identity of the source servers, also known as cutting over, so that users and apps don't have to change anything to access existing data.

◈ Manage one or multiple migrations from the Windows Admin Center user interface.

Typically, in your migration journey, you will use a mixture of tools. So you will need to understand the options available in order to select the right tool for the specific workloads.

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Azure Stack IaaS – part one

Azure Stack at its core is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) platform

When we discuss Azure Stack with our customers, they see the value in Azure Stack providing cloud-native capabilities to their datacenters. They see the opportunity to modernize their apps and address the unique solutions Azure Stack can deliver, but they often pause as they ponder where to begin. They wonder how to get value from the investments they have in apps currently running on virtual machines (VM). They wonder, “Does Azure Stack help me here? What if I am not quite ready for Platform-as-a-Service?” These questions are difficult, but the answers become more clear when they understand that Azure Stack at its core is an IaaS platform.

Azure Stack allows customers to run their own instance of Azure in their datacenter. Organizations pick Azure Stack as part of their cloud strategy because it helps them handle situations when the public cloud won’t work for them. The three most common reasons use Azure Stack are because of poor network connectivity to the public cloud, regulatory or contractual requirements, or backend systems that cannot be exposed to the Internet.

Azure Stack has created a lot of excitement around new hybrid application patterns, consistent Azure APIs to simplify DevOps practices and processes, the extensive Azure ecosystem available through the Marketplace, and the option to run Azure PaaS Services locally, such as App Services and IoT Hub. Underlying all of these are some exciting IaaS capabilities and we are so exciting to be kicking off a new blog series to show it off.

IaaS is more than virtual machines

People often think of IaaS as simply virtual machines, but IaaS is more. When you deploy a VM in Azure or Azure Stack, the machine comes with a software defined network including DNS, public IPs, firewall rules (also called network security groups), and many other capabilities. The VM deployment also creates disks for your VMs on software defined storage running in Blob Storage. In the Azure Stack portal image, you can see how this full software defined infrastructure is displayed after you have deployed a VM:

IaaS is the foundation for PaaS Services

Did you know that the Azure PaaS services are powered by IaaS VMs behind the scenes? As a user you don’t see these VMs, but they deliver the capabilities like Event Hubs or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). This same Azure IaaS is the foundation of PaaS in Azure Stack. Not only can you use it to deliver your applications, Azure PaaS services will use IaaS VMs to deliver solutions on Azure Stack.

Take Event Hubs, currently in private preview, as an example. An Azure Stack administrator downloads the Event Hubs resource provider from the Marketplace and installs it. Installation creates a new admin subscription and a set of IaaS resources. The administrator sees things like virtual networks, DNS zones, and virtual machine scale sets in the administration portal:

However, when one of your developers deploys their Event Hub in Azure Stack, they don’t see the behind-the-scenes IaaS VMs and resources in their subscription, they just see the Event Hub:

Modernize your apps through operations

Often people think that application modernization involves writing or changing application code, or that modernization means rearchitecting the entire application. In most cases, the journey starts with small steps. When you run your VMs in Azure or Azure Stack, you can modernize your operations.

In addition to the underlying infrastructure, Azure and Azure Stack offers a full set of integrated and intelligent services. These services support the management for your VMs, self-service capabilities, enhance deployment, and enable infrastructure-as-code. With Azure Stack, you empower your teams. 

Over the next couple of blog posts we will go into more detail about these areas. Here is a chart of the cloud capabilities you can utilize to modernize your IaaS VM operations:

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General availability of Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V

I am excited to announce the general availability (GA) of the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner for VMware and Hyper-V. This tool helps VMware and Hyper-V enterprise customers to understand their on-premises networking requirements, Microsoft Azure compute and storage requirements for successful Azure Site Recovery replication, and test failover or failover of their applications.

Apart from understanding infrastructure requirements, our customers also needed a way to estimate the total disaster recovery (DR) cost to Azure. In this GA release, we have added detailed estimated DR cost to Azure for your environment. You can generate a report with the latest Azure prices based on your subscription, the offer that is associated with your subscription, and the target Azure region for the specified currency. The Deployment Planner report gives you cost for compute, storage, network, and Azure Site Recovery licenses.

Key features of the tool

◉ The Deployment Planner can be run without having to install any Azure Site Recovery components to your on-premises environment.

◉ The tool does not impact the performance of production servers, as no direct connection is made to them. All performance data is collected from the Hyper-V server or VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server, which hosts the production virtual machines.

What aspects does the Azure Site Recovery Deployment Planner cover?

As you move from a proof of concept to a production rollout of Azure Site Recovery, we strongly recommend running the Deployment Planner. The tool provides following details:

Compatibility assessment

◉ A VM eligibility assessment to protect to Azure with Site Recovery

Network bandwidth need vs. RPO assessment

◉ The estimated network bandwidth that's required for delta replication
◉ The throughput that Site Recovery can get from on-premises to Azure
◉ RPO that can be achieved for a given bandwidth
◉ Impact on the desired RPO if lower bandwidth is provisioned

Microsoft Azure infrastructure requirements

◉ The storage type (standard or premium storage account) requirement for each virtual machine
◉ The total number of standard and premium storage accounts to be set up for replication
◉ The storage-account placement for all virtual machines
◉ The number of Azure cores to be set up before test failover or failover on the subscription
◉ The Azure VM-recommended size for each on-premises VM

On-premises infrastructure requirements

◉ The required free storage on each of volume of Hyper-V storage for successful initial replication and delta replication
◉ Maximum copy frequency to be set for Hyper-V replication
◉ The required number of Configuration Servers and Process Servers to be deployed on-premises for ◉ VMware to Azure scenario

Initial replication batching guidance

◉ Number of virtual machines that can be replicated to Azure in parallel to complete initial replication

Estimated DR cost to Azure

◉ Estimated total DR cost to Azure: compute, storage, network, and Azure Site Recovery license cost
◉ Detail cost analysis per virtual machine
◉ Specifies replication cost and the DR-Drill cost

Factoring future growth

◉ All the above factors are impacted after considering possible future growth of the on-premises workloads with increased usage

How does the Deployment Planner work?

The Deployment Planner has three main modes of operation:

◉ Profiling
◉ Report generation
◉ Throughput calculation

Profiling

In this mode, you profile all the on-premises servers that you want to protect over a few days, e.g. 30 days. The tool stores various performance counters like R/W IOPS, Write IOPS, and data churn, as well as other virtual machine characteristics like number of cores, number/size of disks, number of NICs, ect., by connecting to the Hyper-V server or the VMware vCenter Server/VMware vSphere ESXi Server where the virtual machines are hosted.

Report generation

In this mode, the tool uses the profiled data to generate a deployment planning report in Microsoft Excel format. The report has six to eight sheets based on the virtualization type:

◉ On-premises summary
◉ Recommendations
◉ Virtual machine to storage placement
◉ Compatible VMs
◉ Incompatible VMs
◉ On-premises storage requirement (only for Hyper-V)
◉ Initial replication batching (only for Hyper-V)
◉ Cost estimation

By default, the tool takes the 95th percentile of all profiled performance metrics and includes a growth factor of 30%. Both these parameters, percentile calculation and growth factor, are configurable.

Throughput calculation

In this mode, the tool finds the network throughput that can be achieved from your on-premises environment to Microsoft Azure for replication. This will help you determine what additional bandwidth you need to provision for replication.

With Azure Site Recovery’s promise of full application recovery on Microsoft Azure, through deployment planning is critical for disaster recovery. With the Deployment Planner, we will ensure that both brand new deployments and existing deployments get the best replication experience and application performance when running on Microsoft Azure.

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