Building a SharePoint 2019 MinRole Environment in Microsoft Azure – Build Storage Resources for Azure SharePoint 2019

Moving on to the next step in building out a Microsoft Azure-based SharePoint 2019 environment.  In this post, we are going to build storage resources for Azure SharePoint 2019.  In order to allow your VMs to do anything you are going to need something to store the data, apps, and OS on.  For this, we need to deploy some storage resources to the environment.  What is great compared to my previous series is, in this case, we can build multiple disks to pull from.  The data isn’t going to reside on just a single disk as it did then.  Each of the three main components should have their own account (AD, SharePoint, SQL).

This is a multi-part series.  You can see what is coming and review other posts in the series by clicking one of the following links:

• Microsoft Azure – Prepping the Azure Environment for SharePoint 2019
• Microsoft Azure – Configure Azure Network Resources for SharePoint 2019
• Microsoft Azure – Build Storage Resources for Azure SharePoint 2019 (this post)
• Microsoft Azure – Creating the Domain Controller
• Microsoft Azure – Configuring the Domain Controller Network
• Microsoft Azure – Configuring DNS and Active Directory
• Microsoft Azure – Build SharePoint Server Virtual Machine
• Microsoft Azure – Deploy SQL Server
• Microsoft Azure – Build SharePoint 2019 Template with AutoSPInstaller
• Microsoft Azure – Prepping SharePoint Servers
• Microsoft Azure – Installing SharePoint 2019
• Microsoft Azure – Add a Load Balancer for External Access

Build Storage Resources for Azure SharePoint 2019

Storage Accounts

Before we can actually create our storage devices we need an account to control the functionality.  Specifically, we will create what is known as a “general-purpose v2 storage account”.  As the name implies the account isn’t just for a particular type of storage but will control access to blob, files, disks, etc.  To create the account:

1. Login to your Azure Portal (https://portal.azure.com)
2. On the left-hand side click on All Resouces
3. Click on “+ Add”
4. Select the Storage category and then click on Storage Account

5. Select the subscription and the Resource group that has been used so far.
6. At the storage account name, you have to put in a 3-24 alphanumeric name that is unique across ALL OF AZURE.
7. Select the region you wish to place the disk in.
8. Standard performance is fine for what is required here.
9. Account kind will be Storage V2.
10. Replication is your choice.  I selected Locally-redundant storage (LRS) as this is just a dev instance for me.
11. Access Tier is hot.  Hot tiers are more expensive for heavy storage, but since I am not storing a lot here the cost won’t be too bad
12. Click Next: Advanced

13. Leave the Advanced page as is.
14. Click on Review + Create
15. Review the configuration.  If it looks good and passes validation (automatically checked), click on Create.
16. Repeat these steps twice.  You will want storage accounts for your SQL Server and AD as well.

You will then be redirected to a page with basic information of the storage account and the expected duration of the creation time.  You have now created a storage account that will hold the data for your installation.  In the next post, we’ll start building out the Active Directory for the environment.

Thanks for reading!!