XenData : When a Windows Volume suddenly gets hybrid towards an Azure Storage Account

Introduction

Today I took the Xendata Cloud File Gateway out for a spin… Why? This little piece of software allows a windows volume to be extended by an Azure Storage Account. And from a technical level, we are talking about blob storage here. So you can leverage hot & cold storage, and even archive storage in the long-term. Imagine that huge exploding file server? Suddenly we can extend our typical Windows File Server with an seamlessly unlimited cloud tier. Whoppah!

Let’s take a look shall we!

Azure File Share : Issue mounting outside of the Azure region from Ubuntu Linux

Today I was setting up a deployment with two hosts ;

• One in West Europe (“WE”)
• One in North Europe (“NE”)

The objective was to have a shared mountpoint between both. So I created a storage account in the region West Europe. In this storage account I created a file share, and mounted it on to the VM located in WE. Though when using the exact same config in NE, I got the following error message ;

mount error(13): Permission denied
Refer to the mount.cifs(8) manual page (e.g. man mount.cifs)