Shared innovation unlocks mission critical workloads in Azure

It’s well known that for quite some time (decades in fact) SUSE has been delivering solutions that keep the lights on for customers’ mission critical applications. SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability has long been an integral part of that solution.

Regardless of system architecture, design or integration, SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability has worked across the borders, slotting into place be it for resilient storage, application availability or shipping workloads to a DR site.

Now in our modern world SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability continues to keep those lights on. In partnership with Microsoft and the Azure team, those borders just extended further with Azure shared disks. Now with Azure Shared disks and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability, the you can take your mission critical workloads to Azure in the same supported way you have been using on-premises.

Persistent, shared and flexible.

Azure shared disks provide direct-attached-storage (or local drives) to the VMs in your application cluster. This is achieved through block storage being exposed as LUNs, then presented to an initiator VM. Since the Azure Shared disk provides the underlying storage for your workloads, it is here that SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability steps in with Corosync and Pacemaker, adding resilience to the workloads running on top of Azure shared disks (by creating the filesystem, database and so on).

The granular control through SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability unlocks the power of the Azure shared disk, meaning cluster nodes can read/write to the storage based as required, utilise all of the common configurations used on-premises, and leverage other Azure resources to design mission critical infrastructures that scale as demand increases.

Same use case but on a modern platform.

Support from SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability 15 SP1, which also includes SUSE Linux Enterprise for SAP 15 SP1, means customers can utilise STONITH Block Device or SCSI Persistent Reservation in their cluster environments, unlocking the scale of Azure wiliest meeting the compliance required for mission critical workloads.

What next?

Visit Azure Shared Disks documentation for an overview on how to setup in your shared disks, some sample workloads and the options available. For the more adventurous you may want to read Zhiqiang’s blog on the how to get an active/passive NFS server, or an active/active OCFS2 cluster up and running.