Microsoft Azure file sharing is a fully managed service that Microsoft Azure has built on the SMB3.0 protocol. This solves many of the problems of traditional windows file sharing such as maintaining servers, increasing the size, and high availability. It is a file sharing on the cloud. Azure manages everything. These shares can be connected from within Azure, on-premises or over SMB protocol. Or we can create a hybrid model.
Microsoft Azure File sharing has made it possible to save a copy of your files locally. It allows you to use Azure to manage the data in your on premises environment.
This article will explain how to configure Microsoft Azure File Sync and show you some of the many capabilities that Azure File Sync can provide. This article will cover all activities that can be done in Windows server 2016. We will first create storage accounts and file share which will be synchronized with our on-premises servers.
Storage File Account and Fileshare
Navigate to Azure portal, search for Storage Accounts, and click Create. Navigate to the Azure portal and search for Storage Accounts. Click create to create a storage account. Create the file share by giving it a name and tier. Once the file share has been created, we can create the Azure File Sync service.
Azure File Sync Service
Search Azure Marketplace for Azure File Sync service. Next, you will be able to go to the resource, in this case, “vishalsync”. Next, click on the Register Servers option. Here you can see all servers where the Azure File sync agents has been installed once. Now, we will install the file sync agent on the machine that we want.
Azure File Sync Agent Installation & Server Registration
The Azure file sync agents can be downloaded from the link in the registered servers tab. Select server 2016 from the list. Next, select the default options to complete the setup. Azure file sync server registration pops up. After registering, we authenticate using our azure portal credentials.
We can check Azure Portal to see the registered server where we installed our file sync agents.
Sync Group, Cloud Endpoint, Server Endpoint
We can now navigate to the sync groups and create a sync list. Click on Create Sync Group to create a cloud endpoint. The cloud endpoint is an Azure file share that we want to sync with our on-premise.
Click on sync group to navigate to a page that will allow you find your cloud endpoint. Now create the server point. Now create the server endpoint.
Cloud Tiering and Use Cases
One of the most useful uses of azure files sync is when an existing fileserver is running out space. We can use this to meet increasing storage requirements. This is done by syncing the Azure file share with the on-premise file server, and providing end-users on-demand scalable cloud storage. Cloud tiering can be used to make the local file server a cache for the azure documents. We can also have freq