Cloudmersive Private Cloud Best Practices for Microsoft Azure

Overview

Cloudmersive Private Cloud natively supports Microsoft Azure Cloud. Follow these best practices to facillitate a great installation experience.

General Approach

In general, follow the instructions in the Cloudmersive management portal under Private Cloud Deployment. Extend those instructions with these best practices.

Choosing the Right Azure Virtual Machine Configuration

When creating your Virtual Machine instance, we recommend a DS3_v2 or higher/equivalent. Be sure that your Compute Engine instance has at least 16 GB of RAM. When choosing Virtual Machine Image, be sure to choose Windows Server 2016 Datacenter - with Containers - Gen 2 (do not choose Server Core, the standard Windows Server 2016 image, or a different version of Windows Server). Be sure to set the OS disk to 200 GB or larger. For OS disk type, SSD is recommended but not required. Under Public Inbound Ports we recommend RDP and HTTP or HTTPS. For the installation, connect to the instance over Remote Desktop (RDP). Ensure that the instance has outbound connectivity as described in the instructions. We strongly recommend assigning all IP addresses as static.

Before Installation (Required)

After provisioning your Virtual Machine instances but prior to running the installation, navigate to each node in your Cloudmersive Private Cloud installation in the management portal under Private Cloud Deployment and click on Configure Node. Under External Node Address, copy and paste the Public IP address from the Virtual Machine blade in the Azure Portal. Under Internal Node Address, copy and paste the Private IP address from the Virtual Machine blade in the Azure Portal. If you are using an outbound proxy, check the box for Enable Proxy Server for Outbound Traffic and specify the proxy server. Click Save Changes.

We also recommend disabling automatic Windows Update restarts in Windows Server 2016.

After Installation

If you are installing Cloudmersive Private Cloud in high availability mode, you will want to configure an Azure Load Balancer to balance traffic across the nodes. Create a load balancer under Load Balancers in the Azure Portal and set the endpoints to the HTTP 80 (or HTTPS 443 if you configured it) port on each of the nodes that you installed. Use the public endpoint of the load balancer as the BasePath for all of the API clients.