Deploying Sitefinity projects to Windows Azure

Use this procedure to migrate your Sitefinity project to Windows Azure cloud services.

PREREQUISITES: Before you proceed to deployment, you must have the following:

• You must have an active Windows Azure subscription.
  The following procedure uses Windows Azure Platform Management Portal to manage your hosted services, storage accounts, and databases.
• You must have a valid Sitefinity license for <your domain> or, if  you are using Network Load Balancing, for <domainprefix>.cloudapp.net supporting Network Load Balancing (NLB). If you want Sitefinity to work on a multiple instances in Azure, you must have Network Load Balancing<

  NOTE: Currently, the Enterprise and the Professional editions have NLB support included by default. You can also purchase it as an additional module. For more information, see the License Comparison page.

• You must have Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 installed.
• You must have Visual Studio Tools for Azure and Azure SDK installed.
  You can download them from http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/getstarted.

  NOTE: The following procedure is relevant for Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 1.5 (September 2011).

• You must have a copy of the SQL Azure Migration Wizard installed.

RESTRICTIONS: Deploying the project to Windows Azure has the following restrictions:

• You cannot install a project directly to the cloud. You must create and develop your project locally and then migrate it to the cloud environment.
• You must prepare locally and include in the deployment package all themes, labels (after language pack imports), and other resources that are kept in App_Data folder.Once the project is deployed, they must remain read-only. For example, to include an imported language pack in the deployment, include the ~/App_Data/Sitefinity/GlobalResources  folder in project. Always ensure that the Build action property of the included files is set to Content. To view or change this, in the context menu of the file, select Properties.
• Search is disabled in a way that nothing is actually written to the disk. This means that the UI works as previously, but nothing is actually kept in search indexes and no search results are fetched.
• Video thumbnails are not automatically generated and you must set them manually.

Section contents

Use the following procedure to deploy an existing Sitefinity project to the Windows Azure Platform:

• Setup the cloud environment
• Create a new or select an existing project
• Prepare the project for deployment
• Migrate your database to SQL Azure
• Deploy the project