The Imperfect Lab: Azure Files as a Repository

Oh, the chicken before the egg… or the horse before the cart!  I have this laundry list of things I want to do in the lab, but realized that I would likely need to store some files for my Azure VMs to access.  I will admit that the enhancements with RDP, particularly being about to copy and paste files from a local Explorer window to a remote one are super handy, but I wanted to avoid relying on connecting to the GUI as much as possible.  Plus I wanted to create a centralized location for these files, so I wouldn't need to ensure that file services was always accessible from a particular VM.

Enter Azure Files.

Azure Files allows you to create a SMB share in Azure Storage that is then accessible from machines in the same region. For the Imperfect Lab, my first goal with this is create a location where I can put some files for use later when connect to my Imperfect Lab domain controllers.  You can find a basic, step-by-step for getting Azure Files going  in the Azure documentation, but this is what I did for my lab.

Also for those of you want a neater way to copy my lines of code, you can find the code from this post here. (It's not embedded because the Blogger platform is a PITA, but I digress.)

Created a new storage account:
New-AzureStorageAccount -StorageAccountName <storageaccountname> -Location ‘West US’

Captured the Access Key as a variable:

$storageAccessKey = (Get-AzureStorageKey –StorageAccountName <storageaccountname>).Primary

You can also get the full key from the Azure Portal. Just click "Manage Access Keys" from the black tool bar at the bottom of the page for the storage account.

Created a security context with the access key:

$storageContext = New-AzureStorageContext <storageaccountname> $storageAccessKey

Created a new share:

$share = New-AzureStorageShare <sharename> -Context $storageContext

Created a directory in the share. I called mine "powershell" in this example:

New-AzureStorageDirectory -Share $share -Path powershell

I wanted to upload a file to my new directory, so I used:

Set-AzureStorageFileContent -Share $share -Source "localfilepath" -Path powershell

To check that it made it, I used: Get-AzureStorageFile -Share $share -Path powershell

Okay, now that I have my Azure Files going, I need to be able to access it from my VM in Azure.  You can do this simply by RDPing to your client, passing it your storage credentials and then mounting the share.  You'll need that key from the portal to do this since your VM likely won't be connect to your Azure subscription to capture it as a variable like I did in the previous code.

If you don't want to RDP to the machine, you can do this from the command line of your remote machine by opening a PS-Session, just note that the credentials won't be persistent that way and your mapping won't be retained after a reboot.

cmdkey /add:<storageaccount>.file.core.windows.net /user:<sharename> /pass:<accesskey>

Net use z: \\<storageaccount>.file.core.windows.net\<sharename>

Alternatively, if you don't have persistent credentials, you can just pass them along right with the net use command:

net use z: \\imperfectfiles.file.core.windows.net\imperfectshare /p:no /u:imperfectfiles $storageAccessKey

Once I have that drive mapped, I can use PS-Session commands remotely, yet access files that are stored locally on the VM, like CSV files or to write logs.  And if you want to delete files, use REMOVE instead of SET, or GET if you want to download them.  For example:

Remove-AzureStorageFile –Share $share –Path [foldername]/[filename]

 As an added note, Azure Files differ from Blob storage because they are accessible via SMB and allows you to build a traditional folder hierarchy if you need one.  However only VMs in the same region can access it.  Regular blob storage has the ability to be accessed globally and by the "public" without an access key.  Azure Files are accessible via both REST and SMB, where Blob storage is only accessible via REST.