###BeginCaseStudy###
Case Study: 3
Contoso, Ltd
Background
Overview
Contoso, Ltd., manufactures and sells golf clubs and golf balls. Contoso also sells golf
accessories under the Contoso Golf and Odyssey brands worldwide.
Most of the company’s IT infrastructure is located in the company’s Carlsbad, California,
headquarters. Contoso also has a sizable third-party colocation datacenter that costs the
company USD $30,000 to $40,000 a month. Contoso has other servers scattered around the
United States.
Contoso, Ltd., has the following goals:
• Move many consumer-facing websites, enterprise databases, and enterprise web
services to Azure.
• Improve the performance for customers and resellers who are access company
websites from around the world.
• Provide support for provisioning resources to meet bursts of demand.
• Consolidate and improve the utilization of website- and database-hosting resources.
• Avoid downtime, particularly that caused by web and database server updating.
• Leverage familiarity with Microsoft server management tools.
Infrastructure
Contoso’s datacenters are filled with dozens of smaller web servers and databases that run on
under-utilized hardware. This creates issues for data backup. Contoso currently backs up data
to tape by using System Center Data Protection Manager. System Center Operations Manager
is not deployed in the enterprise.
All of the servers are expensive to acquire and maintain, and scaling the infrastructure takes
significant time. Contoso conducts weekly server maintenance, which causes downtime for
some of its global offices. Special events, such as high-profile golf tournaments, create a
large increase in site traffic. Contoso has difficulty scaling the web-hosting environment fast
enough to meet these surges in site traffic.
Contoso has resellers and consumers in Japan and China. These resellers must use
applications that run in a datacenter that is located in the state of Texas, in the United States.
Because of the physical distance, the resellers experience slow response times and downtime.
Business Requirements
Management and Performance
Management
• Web servers and databases must automatically apply updates to the operating system
and products.
• Automatically monitor the health of worldwide sites, databases, and virtual machines.
• Automatically back up the website and databases.
• Manage hosted resources by using on-premises tools.
Performance
• The management team would like to centralize data backups and eliminate the use of
tapes.
• The website must automatically scale without code changes or redeployment.
• Support changes in service tier without reconfiguration or redeployment.
• Site-hosting must automatically scale to accommodate data bandwidth and number of
connections.
• Scale databases without requiring migration to a larger server.
• Migrate business critical applications to Azure.
• Migrate databases to the cloud and centralize databases where possible.
Business Continuity and Support
Business Continuity
• Minimize downtime in the event of regional disasters.
• Recover data if unintentional modifications or deletions are discovered.
• Run the website on multiple web server instances to minimize downtime and support
a high service level agreement (SLA).
Connectivity
• Allow enterprise web services to access data and other services located on-premises.
• Provide and monitor lowest latency possible to website visitors.
• Automatically balance traffic among all web servers.
• Provide secure transactions for users of both legacy and modern browsers.
• Provide automated auditing and reporting of web servers and databases.
• Support single sign-on from multiple domains.
Development Environment
You identify the following requirements for the development environment:
• Support the current development team’s knowledge of Microsoft web development
and SQL Service tools.
• Support building experimental applications by using data from the Azure deployment
and on-premises data sources.
• Mitigate the need to purchase additional tools for monitoring and debugging.
• System designers and architects must be able to create custom Web APIs without
requiring any coding.
• Support automatic website deployment from source control.
• Support automated build verification and testing to mitigate bugs introduced during
builds.
• Manage website versions across all deployments.
• Ensure that website versions are consistent across all deployments.
Technical Requirement
Management and Performance
Management
• Use build automation to deploy directly from Visual Studio.
• Use build-time versioning of assets and builds/releases.
• Automate common IT tasks such as VM creation by using Windows PowerShell
workflows.
• Use advanced monitoring features and reports of workloads in Azure by using
existing Microsoft tools.
Performance
• Websites must automatically load balance across multiple servers to adapt to varying
traffic.
• In production, websites must run on multiple instances.
• First-time published websites must be published by using Visual Studio and scaled to
a single instance to test publishing.
• Data storage must support automatic load balancing across multiple servers.
• Websites must adapt to wide increases in traffic during special events.
• Azure virtual machines (VMs) must be created in the same datacenter when
applicable.
Business Continuity and Support
Business Continuity
• Automatically co-locate data and applications in different geographic locations.
• Provide real-time reporting of changes to critical data and binaries.
• Provide real-time alerts of security exceptions.
• Unwanted deletions or modifications of data must be reversible for up to one month,
especially in business critical applications and databases.
• Any cloud-hosted servers must be highly available.
Enterprise Support
• The solution must use stored procedures to access on-premises SQL Server data from
Azure.
• A debugger must automatically attach to websites on a weekly basis. The scripts that
handle the configuration and setup of debugging cannot work if there is a delay in
attaching the debugger.
###EndCaseStudy###
You need to configure availability for the virtual machines that the company is migrating to Azure.
What should you implement?
A.
Traffic Manager
B.
Express Route
C.
Update Domains
D.
Cloud Services
Explanation:
ExpressRoute gives you a fast and reliable connection to Azure making it suitable for scenarios like
periodic data migration, replication for business continuity, disaster recovery and other high
availability strategies. It can also be a cost-effective option for transferring large amounts of data
such as datasets for high performance computing applications or moving large VMs between your
dev/test environment in Azure and on-premises production environment.ExpressRoute, Experience a faster, private connection to Azure
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/
Little confused as to why this is the answer. I would think D, Cloud Services
Agree, answer should be Cloud Services
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-choose-me/#tellmecs
C – Update Domain ?
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-manage-availability/
we can read availability in two way’s.
1. redundancy over more dan two locations (servers in update domains / fault domains etc.)
and
2. Scalabilty (like with Cloud Services).
i would go for
update domains, because of this sentense:
“Any cloud-hosted servers must be highly available.”
——————
Expess route is just the connection to you datacenter.
D is correct, you can only create availability set in a cloud service
Update Domains are used for Reliability.
Rather answer should be ‘Traffic Manager’ – Check Page 206 in 70-534 recommended book under ‘Availability Section 4.2’.
CROSS-REGION DEPLOYMENTS
Although rare, region-wide outages do happen as a result of catastrophic events such as
hurricanes and earthquakes. For mission-critical systems, it’s advisable to have key services
deployed across multiple geographic regions so that the system remains available.
Azure Traffic Manager provides automatic failover capabilities for critical applications. You
can configure Traffic Manager to route your customers to a primary site, but redirect them to
a backup site if the primary site continuously fails to answer health probe signals.
A – Traffic Manager looks to be best answer
Traffic Manager it is a load balancer not a connection for migrating on-premise to cloud.
tough one, think in the exam it will be a toss up between Cloud services and traffic manager
don’t thinks it is update – because that’s not really addressing “availability”
Explanation: ExpressRoute gives you a fast and reliable connection to Azure making it suitable for scenarios like periodic data migration, replication for business continuity, disaster recovery and other high availability strategies. It can also be a cost-effective option for transferring large amounts of data such as datasets for high performance computing applications or moving large VMs between your dev/test environment in Azure and on-premises production environment.
Reference: ExpressRoute, Experience a faster, private connection to Azure
http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/expressroute/
Cloud Service as it provides highly available and scalable solution for critical applicaiton and it also allows to configure VM size even though it is PaaS offering.
Update domains are part of Availability sets which are not Cloud Service exclusive. I think the answer is C
Express route is just a dedicated connection to Azure – obviously application level HA could be configured over this connection between cloud and on-prem but I think that is reading a bit too deep into the question.