Thursday, January 20, 2011

Azure Tip: Consider Remote Desktop when Planning Role Endpoints

 

Azure roles offer the ability to configure endpoints for exposing things such as WCF services, web servers, and other services (such as MongoDB). Endpoints may be exposed externally or restricted to inter-role communication purposes. External endpoints may be http, https, or tcp, and internal endpoints may be http or tcp.

Each role in a deployment can be configured to have up to 5 endpoints.  This can be any combination of external and internal endpoints. For instance, you might configure a worker role with 3 input endpoints (meaning the outside world can reach these endpoints) and two internal endpoints (meaning only other role instances in your deployment can reach these endpoints). If you’re optimizing your Azure deployment for a cost-saving configuration, you might be combining multiple services into a single role.

This brings me to today’s tip: Consider Remote Desktop when planning role endpoints.

Remote Desktop is a new capability of Azure SDK v1.3. You now have the ability to RDP into any specific instance of your deployment. It might not seem obvious (it wasn’t to me until I received a deployment error), but Remote Desktop consumes an endpoint for its RemoteAccess module (leaving you with 4 to work with). If, say, you had 5 endpoints defined, and you then enabled Remote Desktop and attempted to deploy from Visual Studio, you’d see something like this:

deployment-error

What might seem even less obvious is that your Azure deployment requires an RDP RemoteForwarder module as well. This module is responsible for handling all RDP traffic and forwarding it to the appropriate role instance. Just like the RemoteAccess module, this forwarding module consumes an endpoint. But this doesn’t necessarily mean you’re down to 3 endpoints to work with, as your deployment only requires a single role to be designated as the forwarder. You can enable it on any role in your deployment, so you can move the forwarder to a role with less endpoints in use. Of course, if you don’t need any more than 3 endpoints, you can leave the forwarder as-is.

You can see the settings for RemoteAccess and RemoteForwarder if you look at the Settings tab of your role’s properties:

rdp-settings

So… as you plan your Azure deployment, keep Remote Desktop in mind when working through your endpoint configurations. RDP is a very powerful debugging tool, and requires at least one endpoint on each of your roles (possibly two, especially if you only have one role defined).

Additional information

Jim O’Neil has this post detailing RDP configuration for the Azure@home project.

1 comment:

  1. Our network connections in the office is a little too chaotic now. I'll have our IT look into this. Hopefully, it brings back order in our system. Or else we have to look into these laptops online sale in Australia and buy new models.

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