Windows Azure powershell – Storage overview

In a previous post, i talked about the CurrentStorageAccountName property of our Azure subscription.

Let’s see how create a Storage account before adding it to our subscription…

man New-AzureStorageAccount

AzureStorage1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is pretty obvious, this cmdlet creates a new storage account in your subscription.

Now, let’s check each argument and what it means

  • AffinityGroup : Specifies the name of an existing affinity group in the current subscription. From what i read on Microsoft documentation, affinity groups are available for all Azure products. My guess is affinity groups are far better for performances, but for Infra, it’s not really usable for now. Keep in mind that even you create your storage account into a datacenter, they can be VERY large and you can’t guarantee the best Network speed if both servers are in physical servers which are opposite.
  • Description : I think the name describes itself…
  • Label : …
  • Location : Specifies the Windows Azure data center location where the storage account is created. Bellow, the datacenters availables.

AzureStorage2

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For a complete  view about the location

Get-AzureLocation | Select Name, AvailableServices | ft -auto

AzureStorage6

 

 

 

 

 

Good to know: Microsoft will transfert blob and tables between datacenters in the same region (Ever heard about Disaster Recovery?), but never in another geolocalisation.. yeah laws aren’t the same in USA and Europe for example 😉

Microsoft says that you can’t specify an affinity group AND a Location.

So now, let’s start create an Affinity Group!

New-AzureAffinityGroup -Name PWRSHELL 
                       -Description "Test Affinity group"
                       -Label "Amsterdam Datacenter" 
                       -Location "West Europe"

And the execution…

AzureStorage3

 

 

 

 

Execute this to list all your affinity groups

Get-AzureAffinityGroup

AzureStorage4

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you want to check on the web interface, just go to Settings > Affinity groups

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Ok, so.. now our affinity group is created, let’s create a storage account.

AzureStorage5

 

 

 

 

 

Ok.. error… after some investigation.. it seems you can’t add CAPS in StorageAccountName, so this is the correct command line:

New-AzureStorageAccount -AffinityGroup PWRSHELL 
                        -Description "Test storage account" 
                        -Label "Amsterdam Datacenter" 
                        -StorageAccountName amsterdam01

AzureStorage7

 

 

 

 

In the web console…

AzureStorage9

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now, this is the part which got us here, how to add you storage account in the subscription !

Set-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName "Free Trial" `
                      -CurrentStorageAccountName amsterdam01

# List your subscription
Get-AzureSubscription

AzureStorage10

 

 

 

 

 

Now, we are ready to deploy our first VM, we’ll see this in a next post !

See ya !