This series of blog posts includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft in the last two weeks.
Azure
New solution for Azure Monitor for virtual machines
The new solution for Azure Monitor for VMs will soon be available in all regions. This update will provide richer monitoring functionality and map data sets for Service Map customers. Once it’s available in your region, it’ll be necessary to upgrade to the new solution in order to continue using Azure Monitor for VMs. Disruption to your workflow should be minimal since Azure Monitor for VMs is still in preview, compared to upgrading after general availability.
Azure Cost Management and billing updates
Here are a few of the latest improvements and updates related to Azure Cost Management in January 2020:
- New ways to save money with Azure.
- Schedule automated exports of your Microsoft Customer Agreement billing data.
- Use custom RBAC roles for management groups.
Large file shares (100 TiB) on standard is available world-wide
Azure DNS private zones is now available in Azure Government and Azure China
Azure DNS private zones is now generally available in Azure Government and Azure China regions. Use Azure DNS private zones for DNS resolution across one or more virtual networks in Azure Government and Azure China clouds. Azure DNS private zones provides a reliable and secure DNS service to manage and resolve domain names in an Azure virtual network without the need to add a custom DNS solution.
Managed identities on lab virtual machines in Azure DevTest Labs
Lab owners can now enable user-assigned managed identities on lab virtual machines in Azure DevTest Labs. Managed identities is a feature of Azure Active Directory that can authenticate any Azure service, including Azure Key Vault, without any credentials in your code. With this feature, lab users can now share Azure resources such as Azure SQL Database in the context of the lab. Once configured, every existing or newly created lab virtual machine will be enabled with this managed identity, and the lab user will be able to access resources once logged in to their machine.
New AMD-based Dav4 and Eav4 Azure VMs are available in additional regions
New Azure Dav4-series and Eav4-series virtual machines based on the latest AMD EPYC™ processor are now available in East US, East US2, West US2, Southeast Asia, North Europe, and West Europe regions. The Dav4-series and Das v4-series Azure VMs are suited for general-purpose workloads. The Eav4-series and Eas v4-series are ideal for memory-intensive workloads.
HBv2-Series VMs are Generally Available
HBv2 VMs are Generally Available in the US South Central region .HBv2 Virtual Machines feature 120 AMD EPYC™ 7002-series CPU cores, 480 GB of RAM, 480 MB of L3 cache, and no simultaneous multithreading (SMT). HBv2 Virtual Machines provide up to 350 GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
