Liferay On Azure

In digital we all hearing more and more about DevOps, this is a software development methodology that stresses on communication, collaboration, integration, automation, and measurement of cooperation between software developers and other information-technology (IT) professionals.

In the process of adopting DevOps, one of the key factors is to drive virtualization. Virtualization refers to the act of creating a virtual (rather than actual) hardware platform, operating system, storage device, or computer network resources.

There are several Virtualization vendors such as Microsoft, VMware, Citrix, Oracle, Red Hat, Amazon, etc. We shall look in depth with Microsoft Azure.

What is Microsoft Azure? A cloud computing platform (PaaS) and infrastructure (IaaS), helps in building, deploying and managing applications and services through a global network of Microsoft managed and Microsoft partner hosted datacenters.

Let's try not to dwell on the theoretical aspects of DevOps, Virtualization, Cloud Computing, or Microsoft Azure I've just covered the topics in short. Main objective here is to illustrate out the steps we performed to have our own Liferay Virtual Machine up and running, and provisioning one in no more than 5 minutes.

When you log in to Azure you will be able to see the below home page.

Using the Azure web User Interface we provisioned a Virtual Machine with image of Windows 2012 Server. Along with the Virtual machine the Cloud Service and associate Storage blobs were created.

Something to keep in mind once the Virtual Machine would be provisioned:
Change the End Point for Remote Desktop - Public Port to 51000. This helps in accessing the Virtual Machine in Mindtree via Remote Desktop.

The provisioned machine would be having C & D drives, the D drive would be a temporary drive that should not be used.

Make sure to Attached a New Disk for the Virtual Machine and Initialize the drive. Initialize the drive and provide drive letter by accessing the Server Management of the Virtual Machine.

We then setup the Virtual Machine by installed the required Liferay Community Edition Portal, required software's and tools.

Once all the required configuration for Liferay setup are done, go ahead and "Capture the Virtual Machine". This would create an Image of the Virtual Machine. This Image can be selected while provisioning a new Virtual Machine, which would replicate all the required Liferay Community Edition Portal, software's and tools.

From the Virtual Machine Image created, we can provide all the project prerequisites immediately and not having to spend days in setting up development machines. The Virtual Machines would be utilized for Center of Excellence, Development, Testing, POC, etc. activities.​

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