2021-W41 update from anDREa
Global Microsoft Azure outage
Last Wednesday (October 13th 2021), news reached us that Windows Virtual Machines (VMs) could not be created, deleted or switched on. As you may or may not know, the myDRE platform is built on Microsoft Azure. Therefore, all of the existing Windows VMs could not be used during the outage. For your understanding: VMs in Azure require certain extensions to function. These extensions are small applications that provide post-deployment configuration and automation tasks within the VM. Unfortunately, a critical extension for starting up Windows VMs failed to get recognized, leading to a massive outage all over the world (with exception of the United States of America Government region and the China region; these are excluded regions in Azure). Read more on https://status.azure.com/en-us/status/history/.
Did you know that storage and VMs are separate resources? Data could still be uploaded and downloaded during the VM outage. All VMs in a particular workspace can access the same storage account belonging to that workspace. However, when something happens to a VM and it becomes inaccessible or has to be deleted, the storage account is still accessible, remains untouched, and allows you to restore files up till 30 days ago due to 30 days rolling 24h snapshot.
The most common cause for VMs becoming inaccessible is the OS disk having insufficient free storage.
This happens also with any normal computer, so when you install software or move a significant amount of data to the C-drive, check the free space. Too low C-drive free space makes the VM slower, causes issues when a temporary space is needed. For instance for unzipping large/many files/folders.
This happens also with any normal computer, so when you install software or move a significant amount of data to the C-drive, check the free space. Too low C-drive free space makes the VM slower, causes issues when a temporary space is needed. For instance for unzipping large/many files/folders.
If you need more OS disk capacity, see Expanding the (OS-)disk - Windows & Linux
During the day, we monitored the status and updated you instantly via one of our newer features: the announcement banner on the login page of myDRE. Reviewing the number of reads on the announcement showed us that the feature has been put into good use. And we will continue to improve the announcement banner, as important messages should be properly highlighted.
Although it was out of our hands, we're sorry for the inconvenience this might have cost you. If your VM is somehow still in the status unknown, please refer to our help article: VM stuck in Status: Unknown.
Related Articles
2021-W51 anDREa Update
Last weekly update from anDREa in 2021 The current year has been an exciting year for anDREa. Quite some researchers have been using the platform since the researchenvironment.org days, the DRE on the Radboudumc Azure cloud. In March 2021, mydre.org ...2021-W33 Update from anDREa
This should be the first of many where we will update you on released and upcoming features, things that are happening at anDREa, etc. Recently added features/improvements Type Description Bug Daily snapshot missing on some of the new and migrated ...2021-W34 Update from anDREa
General Holidays affect the development capacity, but we're moving nicely forward. The good thing is that Microsoft sent us an Azure Sponsorship Offer that will help to move some backend improvements forward. One such thing is multi-region support. ...2021-W51 anDREa Update
We have published a new weekly update with the following topics: Last weekly update of anDREa in 2021 *** DRE support out-of-office during holiday period *** Spot Virtual Machines are available *** Bug fix Read more at: 2021-W51 anDREa Update.2021-W50 anDREa Update
We have published a new weekly update: myDRE NOT vulnerable for CVE-2021-4428 - Apache Log4J2 *** Issues reported regarding resizing VMs *** anDREa FAQ *** Bug fixes Read more at: 2021-W49 anDREa Update.