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
Storage
Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks (preview)
Zone redundant storage (ZRS) option for Azure managed disks is now available on Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs in public preview in: West Europe, North Europe, West US 2 and France Central regions. Disks with ZRS provide synchronous replication of data across the zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues. Disks with ZRS maintain three consistent copies of the data in distinct Availability Zones in a region, making them tolerant to outages. They also allow you to maximize your virtual machine availability without the need for application-level replication of data across zones, which is not supported by many legacy applications such as old versions of SQL or industry-specific proprietary software. This means that, if a virtual machine becomes unavailable in an affected Zone, you can continue to work with the disk by mounting it to a virtual machine in a different zone. You can also use the ZRS option with shared disks to provide improved availability for clustered or distributed applications like SQL FCI, SAP ASCS/SCS or GFS2.
Lower pricing for provisioned throughput on Azure Ultra Disks
Microsoft is announcing a price reduction on provisioned throughput for Azure Ultra Disks by 65%. The new pricing is effective May 1st, 2021, and applies to all the regions where Ultra Disks are available. Azure Ultra Disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).
Azure NetApp Files: Application Consistent Snapshot tool (AzAcSnap)
The Azure Application Consistent Snapshot tool (AzAcSnap) is a command-line tool enables you to simplify data protection for third-party databases (SAP HANA) in Linux environments (for example, SUSE and RHEL). Since the January 2021 preview announcement, AzAcSnap has seen wide adoption among enterprise customers for fast backup of Azure NetApp Files volumes including multi-TB databases and scale-out scenarios for SAP HANA. Now it is available.
The v12.0 agent release had two bugs which are fixed in this release:
- Agent auto-update fails to update the agent to a later version.
- FileSyncErrorsReport.ps1 script does not provide the list of per-item errors.
If agent version 12.0 is installed on your servers, you will need to update to v12.1 using Microsoft Update or Microsoft Update Catalog (see installation instructions in KB4588751).
More information about this release:
- This update is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 installations.
- The agent version for this release is 12.1.0.0.
- A restart may be required if files are in use during the installation.
- Installation instructions are documented in KB4588751.
Networking
Virtual Network peering support for Azure Bastion
Azure Bastion and VNet peering can be used together. When VNet peering is configured, you don’t have to deploy Azure Bastion in each peered VNet. This means if you have an Azure Bastion host configured in one virtual network (VNet), it can be used to connect to VMs deployed in a peered VNet without deploying an additional Bastion host.
Azure VPN Client for macOS (preview)
Azure VPN Client for macOS, with support for native Azure AD, certificate-based, and RADIUS authentication for OpenVPN protocol is in public preview. Native Azure AD authentication support is highly desired by organizations as it enables user-based policies, conditional access, and multi-factor authentication (MFA) for P2S VPN. Native Azure AD authentication requires both Azure VPN gateway integration and the Azure VPN Client to obtain and validate Azure AD tokens. With the Azure VPN Client for macOS, customers can use user-based policies, Conditional Access, as well as Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) for their Mac devices.
Application Gateway Mutual Authentication (preview)
Azure Application Gateway now supports the ability to perform frontend mutual authentication. In addition to the client authenticating Application Gateway in a request, Application Gateway can now also authenticate the client. You can upload multiple client Certificate Authority (CA) certificate chains for Application Gateway to use for client authentication. Additionally, Application Gateway also allows you to configure listener specific SSL policies. You can choose to enable mutual authentication at a per listener level on your gateway, as well as choose to pass client authentication information to the backends through server variables. This feature enables scenarios where Application Gateway needs to authenticate the client in addition to the client authenticating Application Gateway.
Azure ExpressRoute: 5 New Peering Locations Available
New peering locations are now available for ExpressRoute:
- Bogota
- Madrid
- Sao Paulo
- Rio de Janeiro
- Toronto2
With this announcement, ExpressRoute is now available across 75 global commercial Azure peering locations.
