Sitecore Azure ARM PaaS on ASE - Redis

Azure ARM deployment is a very good way to setup our environments in PaaS architecture. Moreover, it allows to customize many things, depends on our project (client) needs.

But sometimes simple things can be complicated, especially when you customizations have some influence on deployment process.

In this post I will share with you with Redis troubleshooting which I did during setuping Sessions on Azure. Especially because of Azure ASE which has an influance on this setup. Some default things don't work out of the box, what can be irritating.

During ARM deployment you can see error like this:

Let's take a look a few potential issues:

We will start with something general (not related to Azure ASE)

1. Check setting InProc and OutProc of you private and shared sessions in configs (according to docs):
1. For Private session go to your site root folder, open the web.config file, and locate the sesssionState section:

   <sessionState mode="Inproc" cookieless="false" timeout="20"

2.  For shared session:
1.  go to your website root folder, navigate to the App_Config\Sitecore\Marketing.Tracking folder.
2. Open the Sitecore.Analytics.Tracking.Config file.
3. Locate the line where you can define the default shared session state provider using the following path: sitecore/tracking/sharedSessionState.
    

• TIP: Check if the relation between configuration is correct because could be wrong (I had e.g. private session set as out of proc, but shared session was InProc by default). Available combinations let's check here:
 

 Sitecore Documentation - Session States

2. ASE resolving URL

 ASE often can be cut off from external access, what means when Sitecore will try to reach default Redis URL it will not achieve it. Because of that you have to change it to IP in connection string. But...to get Ip of Redis, you have to upgrade it from Standard to Premium level

 

3. ASE network influence:  

By default during ARM deployment Sitecore puts every service in default place in your resource group. You have to take care of network and IP ranges which will have it, because being in the same RG doesn't mean it will be in the same network. It may cause to migrate later Redis to different subnet etc.

 4. SSL certificate and ASE

You can have an issue with connection because of SSL certificate, when it will be self-signed. By default, Sitecore recommend to make it through SSL, but we have to think what in our situation when we use ASE? Well, it's isolated environment and if Redis and CD services communicate in ASE scope SSL is not so important maybe. I leave this decision to you.

 

I hope it will help for somebody, because I have spent plenty of time on that topic :)

 Cheers!