Hybrid Cloud on Azure. Deployment Manual

With multi-region support within different datacenters and clouds, the platform offers a Hybrid Cloud solution with advanced automation for certified containers. The intended outcome is the ability to distribute various companies' workloads in a variety of regions, within one Hybrid Cloud.

The platform has already integrated with Azure for ISVs, hosting providers or enterprise customers enabling them to allocate extra regions using Azure Marketplace. As a result, Hybrid Cloud will be available with the following benefits:

Expand hosting business to more countries by selling resources from many datacenters (19 compute regions of Azure)
Burst to Azure in case of temporary applications' load spikes or in the case additional computing power is needed
Disaster recovery using Azure
Backup to Azure

Follow this step-by-step instruction to add extra Azure regions to your PaaS cluster.

Pre-Requirements

1. Active Azure subscription

2. Existent Platform 3.3 installation (public, private or VPC)

3. Domain name for Platform HC instance

4. Preconfigured Azure storage for Platform VM

Go to the Azure portal and click on the New button, then select the Data+Storage > Storage item.

Customize it with the required data:

Storage - name of your storage account
Pricing Tier - storage redundancy and performance
Resource Group - create new or choose the existing one
Subscription - choose subscription the storage will be bound to
Location - select the appropriate Azure region for your storage
Diagnostics - define if you want Azure to monitor your storage health

Click Create when the required data is filled in.

5. Created virtual network for Platform VM

Click on the New button and select the Networking > Virtual Network item:

Fill in the required data:

Name of your virtual network
Address space, Subnet name and Subnet CIDR block - select the appropriate address space and network size.
At the moment you should stick the Subnet CIDR block to 10.0.0.0/24 subnet. This limitation will be removed in the future PaaS for Azure releases.
Resource Group - create a new group or choose the existing one
Subscription - choose the required subscription
Location - select Azure region for your network (the same as you’ve selected for the storage account)

Click Create when the required data is filled in.

6. Odin Virtuozzo containers (PCS) license

Send an email to the PaaS team requesting a product license:

Use the following address: azure.marketplace@jelastic.com and message subject: “Request for the platform License on Azure”
Describe how many Azure VMs you are going to create
The platform will send you back the list of license keys

Platform Installation via Azure Marketplace

Navigate to Azure Marketplace and find Jelastic Standard Edition.

Choose it and click Create Virtual Machine.

After that, you will be redirected to Azure portal (where you need to sign up with your active Azure account) in order to provide the required data for the platform VM creation.

Create Platform VM

In the appeared tile, fill in the required data:

Host Name - name for your VM
User Name, SSH Public Key or Password - credentials for VM administrator
Pricing Tier - the required VM specs (D12 or better is recommended for the platform infrastructure VM)
Optional Configurations required for setup:
- In the Network setup panel, select the local virtual network you’ve created earlier. Specify the Domain Name for your platform - choose the existing domain or create a new one. In the IP Addresses configuration panel, turn the Instance IP address switcher to On, set the Private IP address switcher to Static and specify the IP Address which will be used for the platform VM instance.
  At the moment you should stick the Subnet CIDR block to 10.0.0.0/24 subnet. This limitation will be removed in the future PaaS for Azure releases.
- Configure the Storage account to point to the storage you’ve created earlier.
Resource Group - create a new group or choose the existing one
Location - select the Azure region for your Platform VM (the same as you’ve selected for the storage account and local network previously)

Click Create. The pricing information will be loaded. Click Buy.

Follow the same steps to create more Platform VMs required for your cluster.

Add Storage to Platform VM

Platform HC requires additional storage disk of 350 Gb size or larger for infrastructure and end-user containers. So, follow the next steps to attach the additional storage disk to your Platform VM.

Select the Browse button, choose Virtual Machines and select the Platform VM you’ve provisioned earlier. Then click on the Settings, select Disks and select Attach New.

Here you need to fill in the required data:

Storage Container - select the Storage account and Container where the data disk space will be allocated
Disk File Name - specify a disk name or leave it auto-generated by Azure
Size - the desired disk size in gigabytes
Host Caching - select Read/Write for disk accesses caching policy

Platform Domain Name Configuration (for the first VPC node)

Delegate a domain name of your Platform HC instance to the Public IP address of your first Azure VM with the PaaS cluster deployed using the hints below:

Use your primary domain to delegate a subdomain for the platform name server. Recommended subdomain name: jelastic.primarydomain.com
DNS server names and addresses: ns1.jelastic.primarydomain.com 1 IP address allocated for this DNS server
Zone records example (make sure this is a part of the file for the parent zone primarydomain.com) - note the last one is a glue record:

jelastic.primarydomain.com IN NS ns1.jelastic.primarydomain.com
ns1.jelastic.primarydomain.com IN A 1.1.1.1

Make sure you DON’T have the SOA record for the jelastic.primarydomain.com zone on your DNS servers - otherwise the delegation will not work.

Configure Platform Installation

1. Navigate to the provision portal at http://azure-master.jelastic.com

2. Enter the IP address of your Platform VM, created earlier at the Enter your PaaS at Azure deployment IP address input box and select the Continue button. The provision portal will check this VM for prerequisites and prepare it for the platform configuration process.

3. At the next page, fill in the following data:

Choose the Hybrid Cloud type of installation to provision VM as hybrid cloud region node
Specify a dedicated Cluster domain name of existent VPC
Specify a dedicated Region domain name for a new HC
State the Cluster admin credentials for your existent VPC
Generate a new SSH private key for communication within HC (download and save the key if you plan to deploy more nodes to this HC). When adding more nodes to already existent HC supply the key used to deploy first node of this HC.
Paste the Odin Virtuozzo containers (PCS) license received from our platform
Confirm Terms of Use and click Install

If you attach the second (or further) HC to your cluster, you need to:

choose Hybrid Cloud item
specify a cluster domain and region domain of the existent Azure HC machine
upload SSH key previously generated for the initial HC
state a new Odin Virtuozzo containers license received from the platform

The installation will take about an hour depending on your VM CPU and storage speed.

After that, you’ll be redirected to the admin panel of your VPC where you can configure your new HC.

NOTICE: when your extra VPC instances are installed to the Hybrid Cloud, contact PaaS team to properly set up L3 tunnels between VPCs, establish proper IP routing between regions and infrastructure containers, and finally deploy at least one resolver for the Hybrid Cloud.

User’s dashboard will be available via the corresponding cluster domain name with the app.* prefix (i.e. app.jelastic.primarydomain.com in our case).