LiquidFiles Documentation
LiquidFiles Documentation

Microsoft Azure GCC (Government Cloud) Installation

The LiquidFiles appliance works in Azure Government Cloud (GCC High). However, because LiquidFiles is not a US company, we are unable to publish a pre-configured LiquidFiles image in the Azure GovCloud Marketplace — unlike the public Azure cloud where a marketplace listing is available.

There are two options for deploying LiquidFiles in Azure GCC High:

Option A: Install on Local Hyper-V and Migrate to Azure GCC

This approach uses Azure Migrate to move a locally-installed LiquidFiles VM from an on-premises Hyper-V host into your Azure Government Cloud environment.

  1. Install LiquidFiles on a local Hyper-V host. Follow the standard Microsoft Hyper-V Installation guide to get LiquidFiles running on-premises.
  2. Connect the Hyper-V host to Azure GCC using Azure Migrate. The local Hyper-V host needs to be connected to your Azure Government Cloud environment via the Azure Migrate tool. Once connected, you can discover and replicate the LiquidFiles VM (or its VHD disk) from on-premises to an instance in Azure GCC.
  3. Migrate the VM. Use the Migration and Modernization tool within Azure Migrate to complete the migration. For full details, see the Microsoft documentation: Azure Migrate — Migration and Modernization Tool.

Option B: Upload VHD Image with Azure Storage Explorer

You can download the LiquidFiles VHD from the LiquidFiles downloads page. The VHD has LiquidFiles and the operating system fully pre-installed.

There are two important things to be aware of before importing the VHD into Azure GCC:

1. Convert the VHD from Dynamic to Fixed

The downloadable VHD is a dynamic VHD (compressed, approximately 5 GB on disk) to save download space. Azure only accepts fixed-size VHDs. Azure Storage Explorer will upload the dynamic VHD without error, but the "Create Managed Disk" step will reject it.

You must convert the VHD first on your local machine using PowerShell:

Convert-VHD -Path liquidfiles.vhd -DestinationPath liquidfiles-fixed.vhd -VHDType Fixed

2. Import into Azure GCC High

  1. Convert the VHD as described above.
  2. Open Azure Storage Explorer and connect to your Azure GCC High environment — when prompted to select an environment, choose Azure US Government.
  3. Upload liquidfiles-fixed.vhd to a Storage Account blob container in your Azure GCC High environment.
  4. In the Azure GCC High portal, go to Disks > Create, set the source type to Storage blob, and point it to the uploaded VHD file.
  5. Create a new VM using the managed disk created above as the OS disk.
  6. Once the VM is running, open a browser and navigate to its IP address to access the LiquidFiles setup wizard.

Once the VM is accessible, continue on the Getting Started page.