Beard-Aks-AEDS

Setting up a AKS cluster and adding a Azure Arc Enabled Data Services Direct Data Controller using a jumpbox Azure VM if required.

Pre Reqs

If you need a VM, you can

• deploy the VM deploy-vm.ps1
• You will need to add an inbound and oputbound rule to your NSG for your IP Address
• and then login and set up the VM set up vm.ps1

You will need to have these installed - You can use the set up VM script on your own machine to install them.

• Azure Cli
• kubectl
• Azdata

You need to have created a service principal using

az ad sp create-for-rbac --name <ServicePrincipalName> --role Contributor --scopes /subscriptions/{SubscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourcegroup}

I store and retrieve all my secrets using the Secrets Management module.

Install-Module SecretManagement

and set them with

Set-Secret -Name secretname -Value secretvalue

I recommend this way but in the scripts below you can choose to not use it.

Create an empty resource group

az group create -l eastus -n BensAKSArcRG or New-AzResourceGroup -Name BensAKSArcRG -Location "East US"

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Installation

To install all the componenets required using the scripts in the repo. You will need to alter the variables for your own environment.

• Create AKS create-aks.ps1

• Deploy Log Analytics with bicep if you need it Scripts/deploy-loganalytics.ps1

• Deploy the data controller with bicep Scripts/deploy-dc.ps1

• You can get the endpoints for the data controller

az login
az arcdata dc endpoint list --namespace arc

• Use the Cluster Management Service URL to connect to the data controlled in ADS with the Azure Arc Extension installed
  

Then you can deploy SQL Managed Instances with bicep using Scripts/deploy-mi.ps1

Resources

Once the deployment has finished you will still have to wait for the data controller to create the MI. I use Lens to check the controller pod logs.

You can view the resources in the portal

Right now, I cannot get the SQL Managed Instance endpoints using Azure Data Studio so you will need to go to the portal and get the external IP from the portal for the AKS cluster under Services and Ingresses. You need the one with the name MINAME-external-svc

Then you can use that IP and your admin username and password to connect. See below for more.

You can connect to grafana and see the metrics for the instances using the Metrics Dashboard endpoint from az arcdata dc endpoint list Use the Data Controller username and password. Click on Dashboards on the left and then manage and choose the dashboard to look at. There are dashboards for

• Host Node Metrics
• Pods and Containers Metrics
• Postgres Metrics
• Postgres Table Metrics
• SQL Managed Instance Metrics

SQL Managed Instance Metrics

Host Node Metrics

Pods and Containers Metrics

You can view and search the logs in kibana using the Log Search Dashboard endpoint from az arcdata dc endpoint list Use the Data Controller username and password. Click the menu top left and choose discover to see the logs and then you can query or add filters to search them.

If you filter by pod name for SQLMIName-0 (or -1 or -2 if you have a 3 node replica) and the container name arc-sqlmi - You can see the SQL Server logs, which look like, well, SQL Server logs!!

In the portal you can see the metrics for the SQL Managed instance. CLick on the SQL Managed instance in the resource group and then metrics.

Connecting to SQL

You can connect in Azure Data Studio just like you would any other SQL instance by clicking new connection top left in the connections tab. You will need the External IP of the service as described before.

You can then create a database with a CREATE DATABASE statement and watch it be created, backed up and added to the Availability Group in the container logs of the controller if you are like me!!

or in kibana by searching for the database name