Dave New's questions

Previously our domain, let's call it ourdomain.com, pointed to an IP address (our web host). In addition, we use Office 365 to handle our domain email accounts. DNS records:

ourdomain.com    A        XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
ourdomain.com    MX 10    our-domain.protection.mail.outlook.com   

Now we have moved to Azure's cloud environment. It is recommended to not use A records and rather CNAME records, as IP addresses are not guaranteed to be retained.

So we removed the A record and added the CNAME:

ourdomain.com    CNAME    ourcloudsite.cloudapp.net
ourdomain.com    MX 10    our-domain.protection.mail.outlook.com       

Now our email is not being received. The result of an nslookup for MX records on ourdomain.com is also incorrect.

I've read that we need to have an A record for MX records to resolve. What A record are we supposed to use then?

We could use the IP of ourcloudsite.cloudapp.net, but then we risk having downtime.

I am proposing an Azure environment with the following:

• VM SQL Server for core relational data
• Table Storage for bulk data

I want to mirror the SQL Server database to another server so that

1. Reports can be run on this server so to minimize data load on the primary database, and
2. It can serve as a failover server in case the primary server goes down.

In order to achieve these 2 objectives I would also need to mirror the Azure Table Storage too. I can't seem to find any information on this. Is this even possible?

I have a virtual network setup in the Azure cloud. The virtual machines (all with Windows Server 2008) can only identify each other by IP and not by host name. To do this I need to set up my own DNS server in the virtual network. I do not have the expertise to do this.

Is there not a way to locally configure DNS 'bindings' in each virtual machines' TCP/IP settings?