Connecting FME Server to Azure File Share

Introduction

This article will walk you through how to connect FME Server to an Azure File Share.

FME Server supports the ability to create and manage your own connections to network resources. FME Server resources are a convenient way to store and access data files and locations that workspaces will need access to.

For customers who are already in the Microsoft Azure ecosystem they may have existing data in Azure Files that they need FME Server to access and process.

Connecting FME Server to your Azure Files as a network resource location may provide benefits for FME Server Authors who wish to regularly read and write to Azure Files and may be easier to interact with than using the AzureFileStorageConnector transformer or through Web As A File System.

FME Server users will be able to browse connected file shares through the FME Server Web User Interface.
 

Step-by-step Instructions

Note: In this article I have used the FME Platform Azure Marketplace offering as my FME Server and a separate Azure Storage Account as my connected File Share.

If you don’t already have an Azure File Share, you will need to create one. If you already have a Storage Account with a File Share, open this page in Azure Portal.
 

Next we need to mount our Azure File Share to our FME Server virtual machine. To do this, I followed these instructions.
Select the [...] next to the file share you wish to connect FME Server to and choose ‘Connect’. This will auto-generate a script to run in a shell on your FME Server machine. Follow the instructions for your OS.

3. Mount Azure File Share - run script
Run the script in the correct shell for your OS. In this example, I am using Windows PowerShell. Pay attention to the Root path. This will be in the format \\<storageaccountname>.file.core.windows.net\<filesharename>


 

Verify that you can access your files and folders through the mounted drive in Windows File Explorer.
 

4. Access FME Server
Log in to the FME Server Web UI and navigate to the Resources page (in FME Server 2020 this is under Files & Connections).
 

5. Add Resource Connection
From the top level Resources page click the ‘+New’ button in the top right corner.



You can enter your own Name, Display Name, Description.
For the Type choose Network based resource.
For the Directory of a network file based resource enter in the root path to your Azure File Share. Once all connection details are entered, press OK.

6. Troubleshooting - path does not exist

If this doesn’t work for you (errors that the path does not exist) you will likely need to review the permissions of the accounts running the FME Server Core, Engines and Web Application Interface.
In my situation, FME Server was running as the local system (you can check this in Windows Services) and I had mounted my Azure File Share as the VM administrator user. Therefore, I changed the FME Server ‘Log On As’ to the VM administrator account for the FME Server Core, Engines, Application Server (not the FME Server Database). If you have a specific service account to run FME Server (recommended) you could mount the Azure File Share as that user. For more information on running the FME Server Systems under different accounts refer to our documentation .
 

7. Success
Try browsing to your files and folders on Azure Files through the FME Server Web UI.
You can now read and write to this location when running FME Server jobs.