worker role to mount cloud drive

Question

i am trying to attache cloud drive or VHD to a VM where the worker role will be installed by azure. We need copy some GB of data to worker role machine then perform some task on it.

i have gone through the link http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/windowsazure/en-us/6cf7de11-45f2-47ae-b84e-708b67b15f72/mount-vhd-and-create-iis-virtual-directory-from-code?forum=windowsazuredevelopment

but what i felt is we don't have cloud drive concept in latest SDK.

Can some one guide me how to attach additional drive which is local to worker role and which can be accessed like G:\ drive

Answer 1

It is my understanding that currently CloudDrive is not supported in the 2.x or 3.0 Storage Libraries. On the storage team Blog there is a comment on one of the 2.0 known issues posts that indicates this:

"clouddrive has not been updated to use the latest version yet and hence it does not support the 2.0 client library (which uses 2012-02-12 REST version). However, you can use both libraries together and continue using the older client lib for use with clouddrive (and diagnostics) but use the newer 2.0 lib for everything else in your app."

If you are just copying the data to the worker process would storing the files in BLOB storage be an option and copy them from there? On start up of the worker role (or on whatever task base you need) the data could be pulled from BLOB storage locally to the worker role. This won't be as elegant as simply mounting a drive though.

Another option is to move to a Windows Azure Virtual Machine and exchange the Worker role for a VM with a Windows Service that is running to do the processing. You can certainly attach data drives to a VM. You do lose the PaaS benefits of the cloud service though since you'd then need to care for the VM image(s), ensure they are patched, etc.