Manage the StorSimple Data Manager service in Azure portal
Caution
StorSimple 8000 series will reach its end-of-life in December 2022. Microsoft provides a dedicated migration service for StorSimple 8000 series volumes and their backups. It is imperative that you stop any new StorSimple deployments and begin planning your migration now.
The StorSimple Data Manager contains a dedicated migration service for your StorSimple volumes and their backups. If you want to preserve your file and folder structure, ACLs, timestamps, attributes, and backups, then Azure Files is the ideal choice. Review the migration guide.
The remainder of this article focuses on how to use the Data Manager when blob storage is the target.
Use StorSimple Data Transformation
The StorSimple Data Manager is the resource within which data transformation is instantiated. The Data Transformation service lets you transform data from the StorSimple format to native format in blobs or Azure Files. To transform the StorSimple native format data, you need to specify the details about your StorSimple 8000 series device and the data of interest that you want to transform.
Create a StorSimple Data Manager service
Perform the following steps to create a StorSimple Data Manager service.
Use your Microsoft account credentials to log on to the Azure portal.
Click + Create a resource and search for StorSimple Data Manager.
Click StorSimple Data Manager and then click Create.
For the new service, specify the following:
Provide a unique Service name for your StorSimple Data Manager. This is a friendly name that can be used to identify the service. The name can have between 3 and 24 characters that can be letters, numbers, and hyphens. The name must start and end with a letter or a number.
Choose a Subscription from the dropdown list. The subscription is linked to your billing account. This field is automatically populated (and not selectable) if you have only one subscription.
Select an existing resource group or create a new group. For more information, see Azure resource groups.
Specify the Location for your service that houses your storage accounts and your StorSimple Data Manager service. Your StorSimple Device Manager service, Data Manager service, and the associated storage account should all be in the supported regions.
To get a link to this service on your dashboard, select Pin to dashboard.
Click Create.
The service creation takes a few minutes. You see a notification after the service is successfully created and the new service is displayed.
Create a data transformation job definition
Within a StorSimple Data Manager service, you need to create a data transformation job definition. A job definition specifies details of the StorSimple data that you are interested in moving into a storage account in the native format. Once you create a job definition, then you can run this job again with different runtime settings.
Perform the following steps to create a job definition.
Navigate to the service that you created. Go to Management > Job definitions.
Click + Job definition.
Provide a name for your job definition. The name can be between 3 and 63 characters. The name can contain uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
Specify a location where your job runs. This location can be different than the location where the service is deployed.
Click Source to specify the source data repository.
Since this is a new Data Manager service, no data repositories are configured. In Configure data source, specify the details of your StorSimple 8000 series device and the data of interest.
To add your StorSimple Device Manager as a data repository, click Add new in the data repository dropdown and then click Add Data Repository.
Choose StorSimple 8000 series Manager as the data repository type.
Enter a friendly name for your source data repository.
From the dropdown list, choose a subscription associated with your StorSimple Device Manager service.
Provide the name of the StorSimple Device Manager for the Resource.
Enter the Service data encryption key for the StorSimple Device Manager service.
Click OK when done. This saves your data repository. Reuse this StorSimple Device Manager in other job definitions without entering these parameters again. It takes a few seconds after you click OK for the newly created source data repository to show up in the dropdown.
From the dropdown list for Data repository, select the data repository you created.
Enter the name of the StorSimple 8000 series device that contains the data of interest.
Specify the name of the volume residing on the StorSimple device that has your data of interest.
In the Filter subsection, enter the root directory that contains your data of interest in \MyRootDirectory\Data format. Drive letters such \C:\Data are not supported. You can also add any file filters here.
The data transformation service only works on the latest snapshot of the data that is pushed up to Azure.
Click OK.
Next, the target data repository needs to be configured. Choose storage accounts to put files into blobs in that account. In the dropdown, select Add new and then Configure settings.
Select the type of target repository you want to add and the other parameters associated with the repository.
If you select a Storage account type target, you can specify a friendly name, subscription (choose the same as that of the service or other), and a storage account.
A storage queue is created when the job runs. This queue is populated with messages about transformed blobs as they are ready. The name of this queue is the same as the name of the job definition.
After you add the data repository, wait a couple minutes.
Select the repository you created as the target from the dropdown list in the Target account name.
Choose the storage type as blobs or files. Specify the name of the storage container where the transformed data resides. Click OK.
You can also check the option to present an estimate of job duration before you run the job. Click OK to create the job definition. Your job definition is now complete. You can use this job definition multiple times via the UI with different runtime settings.
The newly created job definition is added to the list of job definitions for this service.
Run the job definition
Whenever you need to move data from StorSimple to the storage account that you have specified in the job definition, you need to run it. At runtime, some parameters can be specified differently. The steps are as follows:
Select your StorSimple Data Manager service and go to Management > Job definitions. Select and click the job definition that you want to run.
Click Run Now.
Click Run settings to modify any settings that you might want to change for this job run. Click OK and then click Run to launch your job.
To monitor this job, go to Jobs in your StorSimple Data Manager. In addition to monitoring in the Jobs blade, you can also listen on the storage queue where a message is added every time a file is moved from StorSimple to the storage account.
View logs after job completion
After completion of a job, you can view the status of the job. Job status can be Succeeded, Partially Succeeded and Failed. You can view the list of files that were successfully copied and files that failed to be copied. These lists are available in a container called "storsimple-data-manager-joblogs" within your target storage account. Within this container, you can look for a folder with the same name as your job definition. Within this, a folder will be created for every job run which will contain your lists. The name of this folder will be the GUID of the job, which you can get from the job details page. Alternatively, in most cases you will see a link for the copy logs within the jobs page itself. There are 2 set of csv files that you will see in this folder. All files that start with copiedfilelist... will contain the list of successfully copied files. All files that start with failedfilelist... contain files that were not able to be copied, along with an error message.
Next steps
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