Tips & Tricks on ‘cloning’ Azure SQL virtual machines from captured images
First published on MSDN on Jul 06, 2016 While we have documentation on how to create a VM from captured image under “How to capture a Windows virtual machine in the Resource Manager deployment model”, it doesn’t address some specifics on SQL Server.
SQL pod may get stuck in "ContainerCreating" status when you stop the node instance on AKS
When we deploy SQL Server on AKS, sometimes we may find SQL HA is not working as expect. For example, when we deploy AKS using our default sample with 2 nodes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/aks/tutorial-kubernetes-deploy-cluster#create-a-kubernetes-cluster az aks create \ --resource-group myResourceGroup \ --name myAKSCluster \ --node-count 2 \ --generate-ssh-keys \ --attach-acr <acrName> There should be 2 instances deployed in the AKS virtual machine scale set: According to the SQL document: In the following diagram, the node hosting the mssql-server container has failed. The orchestrator starts the new pod on a different node, and mssql-server reconnects to the same persistent storage. The service connects to the re-created mssql-server. However, this seems not always be true when we manually stop the AKS node instance from the portal. Before we stop any nodes, we may see the status of the pod is running. If we stop node 0, nothing will happen as SQL reside on node 1. The status of SQL pod remains running. However, if we stop node 1 instead of node 0, then there comes the issue. We may see original sql remains in the status of Terminating while the new sql pod stucks in the middle of status ContainerCreating. $ kubectl describe pod mssql-deployment-569f96888d-bkgvf Name: mssql-deployment-569f96888d-bkgvf Namespace: default Priority: 0 Node: aks-nodepool1-26283775-vmss000000/10.240.0.4 Start Time: Thu, 17 Dec 2020 16:29:10 +0800 Labels: app=mssql pod-template-hash=569f96888d Annotations: <none> Status: Pending IP: IPs: <none> Controlled By: ReplicaSet/mssql-deployment-569f96888d Containers: mssql: Container ID: Image: mcr.microsoft.com/mssql/server:2017-latest Image ID: Port: 1433/TCP Host Port: 0/TCP State: Waiting Reason: ContainerCreating Ready: False Restart Count: 0 Environment: MSSQL_PID: Developer ACCEPT_EULA: Y SA_PASSWORD: <set to the key 'SA_PASSWORD' in secret 'mssql'> Optional: false Mounts: /var/opt/mssql from mssqldb (rw) /var/run/secrets/kubernetes.io/serviceaccount from default-token-jh9rf (ro) Conditions: Type Status Initialized True Ready False ContainersReady False PodScheduled True Volumes: mssqldb: Type: PersistentVolumeClaim (a reference to a PersistentVolumeClaim in the same namespace) ClaimName: mssql-data ReadOnly: false default-token-jh9rf: Type: Secret (a volume populated by a Secret) SecretName: default-token-jh9rf Optional: false QoS Class: BestEffort Node-Selectors: <none> Tolerations: node.kubernetes.io/not-ready:NoExecute for 300s node.kubernetes.io/unreachable:NoExecute for 300s Events: Type Reason Age From Message ---- ------ ---- ---- ------- Normal Scheduled <unknown> default-scheduler Successfully assigned default/mssql-deployment-569f96888d-bkgvf to aks-nodepool1-26283775-vmss000000 Warning FailedAttachVolume 18m attachdetach-controller Multi-Attach error for volume "pvc-6e3d4aac-6449-4c9d-86d0-c2488583ec5c" Volume is already used by pod(s) mssql-deployment-569f96888d-d8kz7 Warning FailedMount 3m16s (x4 over 14m) kubelet, aks-nodepool1-26283775-vmss000000 Unable to attach or mount volumes: unmounted volumes=[mssqldb], unattached volumes=[mssqldb default-token-jh9rf]: timed out waiting for the condition Warning FailedMount 62s (x4 over 16m) kubelet, aks-nodepool1-26283775-vmss000000 Unable to attach or mount volumes: unmounted volumes=[mssqldb], unattached volumes=[default-token-jh9rf mssqldb]: timed out waiting for the condition This issue caused by an multi-attach error should be expected due to the current AKS internal design. If you restart the node instance that was shutdown, the issue will be resolved.Don’t Rely On a Static IP Address for Your SQL Database
First published on MSDN on Mar 27, 2014 I’ve seen a number of customers open support incidents because they couldn’t connect to their SQL Database server which was ultimately due to the incorrect assumption that the server’s IP address is static.Recommendations and Best Practices When Deploying SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups in Microsoft Azure (IaaS)
First published on MSDN on Aug 29, 2014 IntroductionMicrosoft Azure virtual machines (VMs) with SQL Server can help lower the cost of a high availability and disaster recovery (HADR) database solution.
