Pulling an Old Article From the Coffin: SignalR with Redis Running on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine

Long time ago (about 5 years, at least), I contributed an article to SignalR wiki about scaling a SignalR application with Redis. You can still find the article here. I also blogged about it here. However, over time, pictures got lost there. I got a few requests from my readers to refresh those images and I was lucky enough to be able to find them :) I decided to publish that article here so that I would have a much better control over the content. So, here is the post :)

Please keep in mind that this is a really old post and lots of things have evolved since then. However, I do believe the concepts still resonate and it’s valuable to show the ways of how to achieve this within a cloud provider’s context.

SignalR with Redis Running on a Windows Azure Virtual Machine

This wiki article will walk your through on how you can run your SignalR application in multiple machines with Redis as your backplane using Windows Azure Virtual Machines for scale out scenarios.

Creating the Windows Azure Virtual Machines

First of all, we will spin up our virtual machines. What we want here is to have two Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machines for our SignalR application and we will name them as Web1-08R2 and Web2-08R2. We will have the IIS installed on both of these servers and at the end, we will load balance the request on port 80.

Our third virtual machine will be another Windows Server 2008 R2 only for our Redis server. We will call this server Redis-08R2.

To spin up the VMs, go to new Windows Azure Management Portal and hit New icon at the bottom-right corner.

Creating a virtual machine running Windows Server 2008 R2 is explained here in details. We followed the same steps to create our first VM named Web1-08R2.

The second VM we will be creating has a slightly different approach than the first one. Under the hood, every virtual machine is a cloud service instance and we want to put our second VM (Web2-08R2) under the same cloud service that our first web VM is running under. To do that, we need to follow the same steps as explained inside the previously mentioned article but when we come to 3rd step in the creation wizard, we should chose Connect to existing Virtual Machine option this time and we should choose our first VM we have just created.

As the last step, we now need to create our redis VM which will be named Redis-08R2. We will follow the same steps as we did when we were creating our second web VM (Web2-08R2).

Setting Up Redis as a Windows Service

To use Redis on a Windows machine, we went to Redis on Windows prototype GitHub page and cloned the repository and followed the steps explained under How to build Redis using Visual Studio section.

After you build the project, you will have all the files you need under msvs\bin\release path as zip files. redisbin.zip file will contain the redis server, redis command line interface and some other stuff. rediswatcherbin.zip file will contain the msi file to install redis as a windows service. You can just copy those zip files to your Redis VM and extract redisbin.zip under c:\redis\bin. Then follow the steps:

• Currently, there is a bug in the RedisWatcher installer and if you don't have Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed on your machine, the service won't start. So, I installed it first.

• Copy this redis.conf file and put it under c:\redis\bin directory. Open it up and add a password by adding the following line of code:

  requirepass 1234567

  Take this note into considiration when you are setting up your redis password:

  Warning: since Redis is pretty fast an outside user can try up to 150k passwords per second against a good box. This means that you should use a very strong password otherwise it will be very easy to break.

• Then, extract the rediswatcherbin.zip somewhere and run the InstallWatcher.msito install the service.

• Navigate to C:\Program Files (x86)\RedisWatcher directory. You will see a file named watcher.conf inside this directory. Open this file up and replace the entire file with the following text. Only difference here is that we are supplying the redis.conf file directory for the server to use:

  exepath c:\redis\bin
  exename redis-server.exe
  
  {
   workingdir c:\redis\inst1
   runmode hidden
   saveout 1
   cmdparms c:\redis\bin\redis.conf
  }
  

• Create a folder named inst1 under c:\redis because we have specified this folder as working directory for our redis instance.

• When you do a search against windows services in PowerShell, you will see RedisWatcherSvc service is installed.

• Run the following PowerShell command to start the service for the first time.

  (Get-Service -Name RedisWatcherSvc).Start()
  

Now we have a Redis server running on our VM. To test if it is actually running, open up a windows command window under c:\redis\bin and run the following command (assuming you set your password 1234567):

redis-cli -h localhost -p 6379 -a 1234567

Now, you have a redis client running.

Ping the redis to see if you are really authenticated:

Now, we are nearly set. As a last step in our redis server, we need to open up TCP port 6379 for external communication. You can do this under Windows Firewall with Advanced Security window as explained here.

Communicating Through Internal Endpoints Between Windows Azure Virtual Machines Under Same Cloud Service

When you are inside one of your web VMs, you can simply look up the redis VM by hostname.

The hostname will resolve to DIP (Dynamic IP Address) which Windows Azure will use internally. We can configure public endpoints through Windows Azure Management Portal easily but in that case, we would be opening redis to the whole world. Also, if we communicate to our redis server through VIP (Virtual IP Address), we would always go through the load balancer which has its own additional cost.

So, we can easily connect to our redis server from any other connected VM by hostname.

The SignalR Application with Redis

Our SignalR application will not be that much different from a normal SignalR application thanks to SignalR.Redis project. All you need to do is to add the SignalR.Redis nuget package into your application and configure SignalR to use Redis as the message bus inside the Application_Start method in Global.asax.cs file:

protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    // Hook up redis
    string server = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["redis.server"];
    string port = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["redis.port"];
    string password = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["redis.password"];

    GlobalHost.DependencyResolver.UseRedis(server, Int32.Parse(port), password, "SignalR.Redis.Sample");
}

For our demo, the AppSettings should look like as below:

<appSettings>
    <add key="redis.server" value="Redis-08R2" />
    <add key="redis.port" value="6379" />
    <add key="redis.password" value="1234567" />
</appSettings>

I put the application under IIS on our both web servers (Web1-08R2 and Web2-08R2) and configured them to run under .NET Framework 4.0 integrated application pool.

For this demo, I am using the Redis.Sample chat application included inside the SignalR.Redis project.

Let's test them quickly before going public. I fired the both web applications inside the servers and here is the result:

Perfectly running! Let's open them up to the world.

Opening up the Port 80 and Load Balancing the Requets

Our requirement here is to make our application reachable over HTTP and at the same time, we want to load balance the request between our two web servers.

To do that, we need to go to Windows Azure Management portal and set up the TCP endpoints for port 80.

First, we navigate to dashboard of our Web1-08R2 VM and hit Endpoints from the dashboard menu:

From there, hit the End Endpoint icon at the bottom of the page:

A wizard is going to appear on the screen:

Click the right-arrow icon and go to next step which is the last one and we will enter the port details there:

After that, our endpoint will be created:

Follow the same steps of Web2-08R2 VM as well and open the Add Endpoint wizard. This time, we will be able to select Load-balance traffic on an existing port. Chose the previously created port and continue:

At the last step, enter the proper details and hit save:

We will see our new endpoint is being crated but this time Load Balanced column indicates Yes.

As we configured our web applications without a host name and they are exposed through port 80, we can directly run reach our application through the URL or Public Virtual IP Address (VIP) which is provided to us. When we run our application, we should see it running as below:

No matter which server it goes, the message will be broadcasted to every client because we will be using Redis as a message bus.

References

• Redis on Windows prototype
• How to Create a Custom Virtual Machine
• How to Set Up Communication with a Virtual Machine