Laurent Garrigues @elkaturan gave an excellent presentation at the UC2012 about OSIsoft’s efforts to use new cloud capabilities to solve PI user problems. I wrote a little about it here. This week Microsoft publicly released some new capabilities in their Azure cloud and I thought I would take them out for a quick spin.
Scott Guthrie introduced these new capabilities in the keynote at http://meetwindowsazure.com. Scott is the guy driving a lot of the new innovation at Microsoft. People used to joke about the Microsoft “embrace and extend” philosophy which really meant that they tried to co-opt open source and standards based systems with Microsoft proprietary technology. Guthrie seems to genuinely want to open up that open source world to Microsoft users without trying to replace it with a Microsoft alternative. We have already seen the benefits of his approach with ASP.NET MVC, which I am growing to love. His blog is here. You should check it out if you have not already.
On to Azure
The recent update allows us to now run Windows Server VM’s on Azure. I decided to fire up a Windows 2012 Server instance and play around with it. I also created a 1GB SQL database. My plan was to use the Azure SQL database to host my AF Server tables.
When you create the SQL instance, it gives you the connection strings to use with your code. I was quickly able to fire up SQL Management Studio and connect to the database. I ran into a problem when I tried to use the database to host my AF tables. The AF Server expects to be able to use domain authentication, which either isn’t available or would require more time to research than I had for my little experiment. I ended up installing SQL Server 2012 Express in my VM and used that to install AF Server. With AF Server installed, it was easy to install PI Server 2012 RC.
You can see to the right that I am able to run PI SMT on the server and everything looks good. I was able to fire up ProcessBook on my laptop and connect to the server. I did have to configure the endpoints to open port 5450 and 5457 to the outside world. This is done in the Azure management site. I also had to open up the ports on the firewall in Windows 2012 Server.
Overall the process was about as painless as it can be. It was very similar to installing a VM on my development server using Hyper-V. The stock products run without a hitch.
I imagine that I will be able to set up a PI to PI interface to push tags from my development server into the cloud. I’ll save this exercise for another rainy day.
I would also like to go back and see if I can find a way to use the Azure SQL database to host my AF tables.
There are a lot of networking options that would allow you to setup a private network between your Azure components. A VPN option would allow you to connect this network to your corporate network. I’ve got 3 months of free Azure preview. Hopefully I’ll be able to set aside a day or two for more exploration.
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