Atidan is pleased to deploy Microsoft’s Azure Cloud architecture for SharePoint with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups.Utilizing best recommended practices documented by Microsoft, the Atidan team creates SharePoint 2013 Server farms deployed in an Azure cross-premises virtual network. This blog article shows some of the main steps we take and contains links to the latest information and reference.

Atidan team makes this process easy by managing the entire process from architecture,POC, test and into production. We utilize System Center (SCOM) to monitor all Azure operations and keep watching your critical infrastructure in the cloud. Many options are available to provide security, reliability, performance and to meet your budgets. Contact us today to find out about our “Azure Cloud Jumpstart” solutions!

SharePoint with SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups in Azure guides you through the end-to-end process to:

• Understand the value of the SharePoint farm in Azure IT workload.
• Create a proof-of-concept configuration or a dev/test environment for SharePoint application development.
• Configure the production workload in a cross-premises virtual network.

The result of this process is a functional, high-availability intranet SharePoint farm that is accessible to on-premises users.

The end-to-end configuration of the production workload consists of these phases:

• Phase 1: Configure Azure. Create a storage account, cloud services, and a cross-premises virtual network.
• Phase 2: Configure Domain Controllers. Create and configure replica Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS) domain controllers.
• Phase 3: Configure SQL Server Infrastructure. Create and configure the SQL Server virtual machines, prepare them for use with SharePoint, and create the cluster.
• Phase 4: Configure SharePoint Servers. Create the four virtual machines for the SharePoint servers and configure the SharePoint farm.
• Phase 5: Create the Availability Group and add the SharePoint databases. Prepare the SharePoint databases and create a SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Group.

These phases are designed to align with IT departments or typical areas of expertise. For example:

• Phase 1 can be done by networking infrastructure staff.
• Phase 2 can be done by identity management staff.
• Phases 3 and 5 can be done by database administrators.
• Phase 4 can be done by SharePoint administrators.

To make the Azure configuration foolproof, Phases 1 and 2 contain configuration tables for you to fill out with all of the required settings. For example, here is Table V for the cross-premises virtual network settings from Phase 1.

To make the configuration of the Azure elements as fast as possible, the phases use PowerShell command blocks and prompt you to insert the configuration table settings as variables.

Please contact us at azure@atidan.com for additional information about our Cloud Services!