Azure file shares is a durable and highly available storage service provided by Azure that helps in maintaining a copy of your data on your on-prem file servers on the cloud within a storage account. They are extremely useful for replacing or supplementing on-premise file servers to provide a scalable and highly available file storage solution in the cloud.
The files are synced across the servers via the file sync servers onto the cloud making use of the central file storage for sharing files with us. This is quite a handy feature when we wish to have files synced across both servers.
Terminologies in Azure File Sync
- Cloud Endpoint – This represents the Storage Account in Azure (5 TB limit per file share).
- Server Endpont – This would represent the file servers in our on-prem.
Let’s begin by creating a storage account
Click file shares -> Add a new file share
Our file share is now ready
Azure file sync is a separate service that needs to be added as well. In the Search bar look for “Azure File sync” and select it from the list.
Fill in the appropriate details below
- Subscription
- Resource Group
- Storage Sync Service Name
- Region
- Tier – Basic
In the Azure File Sync creation page, Click on the “Create” button
Deploy two VMs – file 01 and file 02 and both these servers will need the Azure file sync agent installed.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=57159
Download the product
Click Next to continue
Click Next to continue
Connect to our Azure account to complete the server registration.
Choose our subscription and the Filesync service we created here.
Verify if registration is succesful
Under our resources, we can see our Storage Sync Service being registered
Once the file server Storage Sync service is registered we can see both the file servers under Azure
Files are synced across the server via the sync service and make use of a central location for storing files. Under the Sync Group add our Cloud Endpoint.
Fill in the appropriate details below
- SyncGroup Name – This is the Cloud Endpoint name
- Storage Account
- Azure FileShare Name
Cloud Endpoint name is registered.
Under Server Endpoints, we will add our on-prem file servers
Choose the first file server and under the path, we will select a folder structure that’s existing on the fileserver that has data on it. Files from this path will be synced to our cloud storage account.
Repeat the same action on the second file server too, as as we add folders into the C:\data directory we will see files synced on both servers.
Our Sync Group shows data in sync between the cloud endpoint and server endpoint
