Best Practices? - Migrating On-prem File Servers to Azure Files

Question

We are in the process of lift and shifting on-prem file servers to Azure Files. What are best practices for the following?

Is it best to migrate multiple File Servers to single a Storage Account? or separate Storage Accounts for each existing file server? I think we are limited to 250 storage accounts, so I want to account for that in the future.

We will have multiple Azure File Sync servers so is it okay to use a single Storage Sync Service for all of them or is there something else to take in account for this as well?

Answer 1

@Patrick K Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A. I understand that you are having questions regarding best practices while migrating on-premise fileserver to Azure Files.

As per the Management Concepts for Azure Files,

"Paying attention to a storage account's IOPS limitations when deploying Azure file shares. Ideally, you would map file shares 1:1 with storage accounts. However, this may not always be possible due to various limits and restrictions, both from your organization and from Azure. When it is not possible to have only one file share deployed in one storage account, consider which shares will be highly active and which shares will be less active to ensure that the hottest file shares don't get put in the same storage account together."

In regard to Azure File Sync Servers-

The core resource to configure for Azure File Sync: a Storage Sync Service. A Windows Server can only be registered to one Storage Sync Service. So it is often best to only deploy a single Storage Sync Service and register all servers on it.

Create multiple Storage Sync Services only if you have:

• distinct sets of servers that must never exchange data with one another. In this case, you want to design the system to exclude certain sets of servers to sync with an Azure file share that is already in use as a cloud endpoint in a sync group in a different Storage Sync Service. Another way to look at this is that Windows Servers registered to different storage sync service cannot sync with the same Azure file share.
• a need to have more registered servers or sync groups than a single Storage Sync Service can support. Review the Azure File Sync scale targets for more details.

Please also refer to this link regarding creating additional 5000 Azure Storage accounts within your Subscription

Does this help answer all your questions? If you have any more questions, please do let me know and I will be glad to assist you further. Thank you!

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