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

Compute

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux

Azure Hybrid Benefit functionality is available for Linux customers, allowing you to bring both your on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses, as well as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) subscriptions to Azure.

Microsoft to establish its first datacenter region in Sweden

Microsoft’s newest datacenter region will be among the most sustainable to date, as Microsoft will be partnering with Vattenfall around their 24/7 matching solution, which will track renewable energy consumption in the upcoming Swedish datacenters. The Microsoft Cloud delivered from datacenters in Sweden will enable Swedish businesses to empower employees, engage customers, transform products, and optimize operations, all through connected experiences and supported by advanced data privacy and security. Upcoming plans also include a skilling initiative for up to 150,000 Swedes. Microsoft’s community investments in Sweden total more than $1.25 million (U.S.) in partnership with 13 organizations to advance STEM programs focused on youth, skilling and culture. The new region will also deliver Availability Zones.

Storage

SMB Multichannel available on Azure Files premium tier (preview)

SMB Multichannel enables an SMB 3.x client to establish multiple network connections to a premium file share, and hence, increasing client’s performance up to 3x in terms of IOPS and throughput. Workloads running on the premium file shares can now achieve the required scale from a single virtual machine (VM) or a smaller set of VMs, thereby reducing the total cost of ownership.

Performance tiers for Premium SSDs

To sustain high performance demands for a specific duration, such as running a training environment during daytime, performance testing, or an event like Black Friday, you can now set the performance tier of your Premium SSDs without increasing the capacity of the disk. This provides the flexibility to achieve higher performance while also controlling costs. To start with, a baseline performance tier is set based on the provisioned disk size. However, when your application has higher performance demands, you can choose a higher performance tier. Once the period of high demand is complete, your provisioned disk can return to the initial baseline performance tier. For example, if you initially provision a P10 disk (128GB), your baseline performance tier is set as P10 (500 IOPS and 100MB/s). Later, you can update the tier to match the performance of P50 (7500 IOPS and 250MBs) and return to P10 when higher performance is no longer needed.

More IOPS at no additional cost for Azure Files premium tier

Effective immediately, all premium shares get an input/output per second (IOPS) uplift for free. All shares get an additional 400 baseline IOPS, and even the smallest share of 100 GiB can now burst up to 4,000 IOPS. This change is particularly beneficial for workloads that do not have a high capacity requirement but need extra performance to accommodate spikes in traffic or sudden unpredictable loads, such as web applications, backup and restore operations, and batch jobs.

Earlier:

• Baseline IOPS = 1 * provisioned GiB. (Up to a max of 100,000 IOPS).
• Burst Limit = 3 * Baseline IOPS. (Up to a max of 100,000 IOPS).

With this change:

• Baseline IOPS = 400 + 1 * provisioned GiB. (Up to a max of 100,000 IOPS).
• Burst Limit = MAX (4,000, 3 * Baseline IOPS). (Up to a max of 100,000 IOPS).

The new IOPS limits are available in all Azure Files premium tier regions. This additional free IOPS offer coupled with our recent price reduction of 33% on Azure Files premium tier will significantly reduce the total cost of deployment.

Networking

VPN over ExpressRoute private peering

For customers such as those in financial and health industries, double encryption over both their private WANs and Azure WAN is a key compliance requirement. VPN over ExpressRoute private peering allows customers to use IPsec tunnels over their ExpressRoute private peering to satisfy this need. You can configure a Site-to-Site VPN to a virtual network gateway over an ExpressRoute private peering using an RFC 1918 IP address. This configuration provides the following benefits:

• Traffic over private peering is encrypted.

• Point-to-site users connecting to a virtual network gateway can use ExpressRoute (via the Site-to-Site tunnel) to access on-premises resources.

New features for Azure VPN Gateway

 The following new features for Azure VPN Gateway as generally available:

• High availability for RADIUS servers in point-to-site VPN – This feature enables highly available configuration for customers using RADIUS/AD authentication for their point-to-site VPN.
• Custom IPsec/IKE policy with DPD timeout – Setting IKE DPD (Dead Peer Detection) timeout allows customers to adjust the IKE session timeout value based on their connection latency and traffic conditions to minimize unnecessary tunnel disconnect, improving both reliability and experience. This feature brings the entire custom IPsec/IKE policy configuration experience to Azure Portal.
• APIPA support for BGP speaker – This feature supports customers with legacy VPN routers and Amazon Web Service (AWS) VGW, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VPN which use Automatic Private IP Addressing (APIPA) addresses as their Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) speaker IP addresses. Now they can establish BGP sessions with Azure VPN gateways using APIPA (169.254.x.x) addresses.
• FQDN support for site-to-site VPN – This feature supports customer branches or locations without static public IP addresses to connect to Azure VPN gateways. Customers can now leverage dynamic DNS services and use their Fully Qualified Domain Name (FQDN) instead of IP addresses. Azure VPN gateways will automatically resolve and update the VPN target to establish IPsec/IKE connections.
• Session management and revocation for point-to-site VPN users – Enterprise administrators can now list and revoke individual user connections to their VPN gateways from Azure Portal in real time, addressing a key management asks.

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

Compute

New SAP HANA Certified Memory-Optimized Virtual Machines

Microsoft is expanding SAP HANA certifications, enabling you to run production SAP HANA workloads on the Edsv4 virtual machines sizes.

Storage

Azure File Sync agent v11.1 

Improvements and issues that are fixed:

• New cloud tiering modes to control initial download and proactive recall
  • Initial download mode: you can now choose how you want your files to be initially downloaded onto your new server endpoint. Want all your files tiered or as many files as possible downloaded onto your server by last modified timestamp? You can do that! Can’t use cloud tiering? You can now opt to avoid tiered files on your system. To learn more, see Create a server endpoint section in the Deploy Azure File Sync documentation.
  • Proactive recall mode: whenever a file is created or modified, you can proactively recall it to servers that you specify within the same sync group. This makes the file readily available for consumption in each server you specified. Have teams across the globe working on the same data? Enable proactive recalling so that when the team arrives the next morning, all the files updated by a team in a different time zone are downloaded and ready to go! To learn more, see Proactively recall new and changed files from an Azure file share section in the Deploy Azure File Sync documentation.
• Exclude applications from cloud tiering last access time tracking
  • You can now exclude applications from last access time tracking. When an application accesses a file, the last access time for the file is updated in the cloud tiering database. Applications that scan the file system like anti-virus cause all files to have the same last access time which impacts when files are tiered. For more details, see the release notes.
• Miscellaneous performance and reliability improvements
  • Improved change detection performance to detect files that have changed in the Azure file share.
  • Improved sync upload performance.
  • Initial upload is now performed from a VSS snapshot which reduces per-item errors and sync session failures.
  • Sync reliability improvements for certain I/O patterns.
  • Fixed a bug to prevent the sync database from going back-in-time on failover clusters when a failover occurs.
  • Improved recall performance when accessing a tiered file.

To obtain and install this update, configure your Azure File Sync agent to automatically update when a new version becomes available or manually download the update from the Microsoft Update Catalog.

The agent version for this release is 11.1.0.0 and a restart may be required if files are in use during the agent installation. Installation instructions are documented in KB4539951.

Networking

New Azure Firewall capabilities

This new Azure Firewall capabilities will be generally available in Q4 CY2020:

• Custom DNS: Allows you to configure Azure Firewall to use your own DNS server.
• DNS Proxy capability: You can enable your Azure Firewall to act as a proxy for your DNS traffic. This is crucial for reliable FQDN filtering in network rules and provides DNS security through integration.
• FQDN filtering in network rules: You can use this based on DNS resolution from Custom DNS or Azure DNS. This capability is recommended for protocols that are not supported with FQDN filtering in application rules today.

You can learn more about DNS Settings in this document.

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

Compute

Microsoft plans to establish new cloud datacenter region in Austria

Microsoft announced intent to build a new datacenter region in Austria. The announcement also included details around establishment of a new Center of Digital Excellence in Austria, as well as a digital skilling initiative targeted at reaching approximately 120,000 Austrians by 2024.

Microsoft to establish its first datacenter region in Taiwan

Microsoft has announced plans to build a new datacenter region in Taiwan, along with a skilling initiative for over 200,000 people in Taiwan by 2024. The new region will also include Availability Zones, building on Microsoft’s 30+ year history in Taiwan.

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare (generally available)

Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare is now generally available. This integrated solution enables customers to quickly access a portfolio of released and new healthcare capabilities tailored to the unique requirements of health data in the cloud. It unlocks the power of Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, and our ecosystem of partner healthcare solutions to create trusted, end-to-end cloud-based solutions. Healthcare organizations can engage in more proactive ways with patients and give caregivers tools to improve workflow efficiency and streamline interactions. Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare will make it easier for healthcare organizations to remain agile and focus on what they do best delivering better experiences, insights, and care. For more information on general availability read this page.

Azure SQL Virtual Machines with SQL Server IaaS Agent extension

Registering your SQL Server Virtual Machine images in Azure Marketplace and extracting the total value from your Azure IaaS data estate is now easier with the SQL Server IaaS Extension now in general availability. Previously, in order to enjoy the full scope of cost saving and manageability features offered on Azure SQL Server Virtual Machines, you had to run a complicated script that required a large portion of time. Now you can simply tick a consent checkbox and allow Microsoft to automatically register all existing and future SQL Server Virtual Machines in your subscription. Access a number of features designed to save you money and increase manageability by providing a PaaS-like service while still maintaining the ability to customize your data estate that is integral to any IaaS service.

Storage

Soft delete for Azure file shares is now generally available in all regions

Soft delete acts like a recycle bin for your file shares, protecting your Azure file shares from accidental deletion. Now when a file share is deleted, it transitions to a soft deleted state in the form of a soft deleted snapshot. You get to configure how long soft deleted data is recoverable for before it is permanently erased. In January 2021, soft delete will be enabled by default for all new storage accounts with a default retention period of 7 days. Settings for existing storage accounts will not change.

Azure Blob storage lifecycle management supports blob versions management

Azure Blob storage lifecycle management now supports blob versions. Microsoft recommends using blob versioning to maintain previous versions of a blob for data protection. When blob versioning is enabled for a storage account, Azure Storage automatically creates a new version of a blob each time that blob is modified or deleted. You can use lifecycle management to automatically transition old blob versions to a cooler storage tier (hot to cool, hot to archive, or cool to archive) or delete old blob versions to optimize for cost. The lifecycle management feature is free of charge. Customers are charged the regular operation cost for the Set Blob Tier API calls. Delete operation is free. For more information about pricing, see Block Blob pricing.

Policy to control the minimum TLS version used with Azure Storage

Azure Storage now offers administrators the flexibility to specify the minimum version of TLS that a client application must use to communicate with a storage account. Microsoft recommends that you follow a DRAG (Detection-Remediation-Audit-Governance) framework to continuously manage secure TLS for your storage accounts.

Networking

New features for Azure VPN Gateway (preview)

Microsoft is announcing the following new features for Azure VPN Gateway in public preview:

• High availability for RADIUS servers in point-to-site VPN – This feature enables highly available configuration for customers using RADIUS/AD authentication for their point-to-site VPN.
• VPN over ExpressRoute private peering – For customers such as those in financial and health industries, double encryption over both their private WANs and Azure WAN is a key compliance requirement. VPN over ExpressRoute private peering allows customers to use IPsec tunnels over their ExpressRoute private peering to satisfy this need.
• Custom IPsec/IKE policy with DPD timeout – Setting IKE DPD (Dead Peer Detection) timeout allows customers to adjust the IKE session timeout value based on their connection latency and traffic conditions to minimize unnecessary tunnel disconnect, improving both reliability and experience. This feature brings the entire custom IPsec/IKE policy configuration experience to Azure Portal.
• APIPA support for BGP speaker – This feature supports customers with legacy VPN routers and Amazon Web Service (AWS) VGW, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) VPN which use APIPA addresses as their BGP speaker IP addresses. Now they can establish BGP sessions with Azure VPN gateways using APIPA addresses.
• FQDN support for site-to-site VPN – This feature supports customer branches or locations without static public IP addresses to connect to Azure VPN gateways. Customers can now leverage dynamic DNS services and use their FQDNs instead of IP addresses. Azure VPN gateways will automatically resolve and update the VPN target to establish IPsec/IKE connections.
• Session management and revocation for point-to-site VPN users – Enterprise administrators can now list and revoke individual user connections to their VPN gateways from Azure Portal in real time, addressing a key management asks.

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

Compute

New cloud datacenter region in Greece

Microsoft has announced plans build its newest datacenter region in Greece. This announcement will also encompass a skilling initiative which will reach a minimum of 100,000 people in Greece, as well as an AI for Cultural Heritage initiative, which will digitize 3D video from the Ancient City of Olympia. The new region is anticipated to include Microsoft Azure, with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to follow.

New Azure Spot Virtual Machines features

In the Azure portal, you can now access the spot price and the eviction rate for the past 28 trailing days for the specific Spot VM you intend to deploy. These new capabilities will enable you to derive estimates about the probability that your workloads will be evicted while providing insights regarding the cost of running interruptible workloads using Spot VMs.

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series expanding within Europe, United Kingdom and United States

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in North Europe, UK West and US West. Customers in Europe, United Kingdom and United States now have disaster recovery capabilities available. These VMs are backed by the latest generation of Intel XEON E-2288G processor with Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology, and with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology these machines can go up to 5.0 GHz. Use the DCsv2-series instances to build secure, enclave-based applications to protect your code and data while it’s in use.

Azure DevTest Labs: network isolated lab

An Azure Virtual Network helps ensure that private network traffic is logically isolated from outside traffic. Each lab can be configured with an Azure network to ensure virtual machines and environments created within are isolated from unwanted traffic and follow enterprise networking policies. Lab owners can also now create a network isolated lab. This means, alongside isolating lab virtual machines and environments to a selected network, lab owners can also isolate the lab storage account and key vaults created for certain lab operations. Learn more about how you can create an isolated network lab.

Storage

Azure NetApp Files Manual QoS Capacity Pool (preview)

Microsoft is introducing Azure NetApp Files (ANF) manual quality of service (QoS) capacity pool, which is a new type of capacity pool that allows you to assign the capacity and throughput for a volume independently. The total throughput of all volumes created with a manual QoS capacity pool is limited by the total throughput of the pool. The total throughput of the pool is determined by the combination of the pool size and the service-level throughput. Find more details in the ANF user documentation.

Azure Blob: Soft Delete for Containers preview region expansion

Soft delete for containers expands upon Azure Blob Storage’s existing capabilities such as blob versioning, soft delete for blobs, account delete locking, and immutable blobs, making our data protection and restore capabilities even better. When container soft delete is enabled for a storage account, any deleted container and their contents are retained in Azure Storage for the period that you specify. During the retention period, you can restore previously deleted containers and any blobs within them. Microsoft is expanding the public preview to all public Azure regions. There is no additional charge to enable container soft delete. Data in soft deleted containers is billed at the same rate as active data.

Azure Files premium tier is now available in more regions with LRS, ZRS, and NFS support

Azure Files premium tier storage offers highly-performant, highly available file services, that is built on solid-state drives (SSD). Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency. More Azure Files premium tier regions, more premium files regions with locally redundant storage (LRS), zone redundant storage (ZRS) support, and Network File System (NFS 4.1) public preview support. Stay up to date on the premium tier region availability through the Azure region availability page.

Networking

Standard Load Balancer and Public IP addresses support resource group move

Standard Load Balancers and Standard Public IP addresses now support being moved across resource groups within the same subscription. Moving a resource only moves it to a new resource group. It doesn’t change the location of the resource or the subscription. Moving Standard Load Balancers and Public IP addresses across resource groups is supported in all Azure public cloud regions.

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.

In this dedicated post you can find the most important announcements and major updates officialized last week during Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference.

Azure

Compute

The new Azure VMware Solution is now generally available

Designed, built, and supported by Microsoft, Cloud Verified by VMware, running VMware Cloud Foundation technologies, Azure VMware Solution enables customers to extend or migrate VMware workloads to the cloud seamlessly. Organizations can maintain existing VMware skills and operational processes, running VMware Cloud Foundation technologies, and leverage the benefits of Azure, all at the same time.

Storage

Price reduction on the Azure Files premium tier by 33%

The new pricing is effective October 1st and applies to all the regions/redundancy options for the premium tier. The price reduction on the premium tier, coupled with the recent introduction of two new hot and cool tiers, makes customers’ decision easier to choose the right files storage tier that fits best their workload’s needs while offering a most cost effective storage.  Azure Files premium tier hosted on SSD storage, with no additional cost for transactions, is best suited for workloads that are IO intensive, with high throughput and low latency needs. The three standard tiers (transaction optimized, hot, and cool) are best suited for workloads that do not need high throughput or IOPS but require a reliable lower cost storage.

Shared disks on Azure Disk Storage is now available in broader set of regions

With shared disks, Azure Disk Storage is the only shared block storage in the cloud that supports both Windows and Linux based clustered or high-availability applications. Shared disks is now available for Premium SSDs in all regions and available for Ultra Disks in all regions that support Ultra Disks. Shared disks allows a single disk to be attached to multiple virtual machines, enabling customers to run their most demanding enterprise applications in the cloud like clustered databases, parallel file systems, persistent containers, and machine learning applications, without compromising on well-known deployment patterns for fast failover and high availability.

This special edition includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft this week during Microsoft Ignite 2020 conference. Microsoft announced several important additions to its Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) portfolio and the Microsoft infrastructure services continue to evolve to optimize the experience of running business-critical workloads.

Azure

Compute

Availability Zones deployed to more Azure Regions

Azure Availability Zones (AZs) provide a high-availability option for comprehensive business-continuity and disaster-recovery strategies (BCDR), 99.99% uptime service-level agreement (SLA) on virtual machines, flexible high-performance architecture and multizone support with built-in security. Microsoft continues to expand deployment of Availability Zones in datacenter regions worldwide, with a roadmap to provide Availability Zone options in each country it operates datacenters in over the next 24 months. In September, Availability Zones will be available in two more existing regions, Canada Central and Australia East, bringing the total number of Microsoft’s AZ-enabled regions to 14.

Zone to zone disaster recovery for azure virtual machines

Zone to Zone disaster recovery allows customers to replicate, failover and failback their business-critical virtual machines within the same region with zones. The capability adds options for scenarios such as metro-based disaster-recovery strategy while customers are hosting applications on-premises and are looking to mimic that after migrating applications over to Azure; those that have complicated networking infrastructure and want to avoid the cost and complexity of recreating it in a secondary region; and those in regions that prefer not to use paired region disaster recovery options.

New Azure Spot VM features

New Azure Spot VM features, in preview soon in the Azure portal, enable customers to access and review the price history of Spot VMs and eviction rate for the past 28 trailing days. Also, not only allow customers to derive estimates about the probability that their workloads will be evicted, but also enable better estimates for the cost of running interruptible workloads using Spot VMs.

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux workload (preview)

Azure Hybrid Benefit, available in preview, improves flexibility and enhances user experience for Red Hat and SUSE customers migrating Linux to Azure.Directly in the portal or through CLI, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) customers will be able to convert existing Linux VMs from pay-as-you-go (PAYG) billing to bring-your-own-subscription (BYOS) billing, making use of their existing Red Hat and SUSE subscriptions. This is a unique capability that allows customers to first deploy a POC in Azure using the convenience of on-demand PAYG Linux VMs, and when testing is complete, convert it to long-term production using RHEL and SLES subscriptions. This removes the headache of production redeployment, preserves existing investments in on-premises RHEL and SLES subscriptions, and reduces migration planning worries.

A new Azure-supported Linux distribution

Flatcar Container Linux by Kinvolk, is now available in Azure Marketplace. Flatcar is an immutable Linux distribution and is compatible with Core OS (which reached its end of service on May 26, 2020), making Flatcar Container Linux a viable and straightforward migration choice for container workloads running on Azure.

Azure Image Builder

Azure Image Builder, generally available by the end of this year, is a free image-building service that streamlines the creation, update, patch, management and operation of Linux and Windows images. Azure Image Builder will deploy resources into your subscription when used, and you pay only for the virtual machines and associated storage and networking resources consumed when running your image-building pipeline.

Multiple new Azure Infrastructure features

Multiple new Azure Infrastructure features are now available:

• New Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are now generally available featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors for general purpose and memory-intensive workloads. These VMs provide up to 20% greater CPU performance compared to the prior generation.
• Azure Dedicated Host now gives customers more control. Customers can schedule host maintenance operations on Dedicated Hosts and isolated VMs as well as control when guest OS image updates are rolled out. Azure Dedicated Host also supports Virtual Machine Scale Sets and simplifies deployment by offering customers the ability to let the platform select the host group where VMs are deployed to.

Storage

New Azure Disk Storage updates

New Azure Disk Storage updates, including:

• Azure Private Link integration which enables secure import and export of data over a private virtual network for enhanced security
• Support for 512E on Azure Ultra Disks to enable migration of legacy databases to Azure.

Networking

Cisco SD-WAN with Azure Virtual and Global Load Balancer feature (preview)

Azure networking enhancements announced at Ignite include the addition of Cisco Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) native support within the Azure Virtual WAN hubs, and the Global Load Balancer feature for Azure Load Balancer. Both are available in preview.

The use of Cisco SD-WAN with Azure Virtual WAN aligns with networking trends to leverage technologies such as SD-WAN to improve performance through intelligent path selection and central policies. They work to eliminate traditional networking backhauls by sending traffic directly from branch to the cloud via local breakouts and allow you to leverage your chosen vendor’s path selection and policy management.

With Global Load Balancer, customers can use the feature in the Azure Load Balancer to distribute traffic to their global applications, improving performance and availability.

Azure orbital: a new managed service that provides access to physical satellite communication  (private preview)

Azure Orbital is a new managed service that provides access to physical satellite communication capabilities to process and analyze data in Microsoft Azure. Take advantage of a low-latency global fiber network when working with large satellite datasets. Azure Orbital is available now to select customers in private preview. Azure Orbital enables satellite operators to schedule contacts with their spacecrafts and directly downlink data into their virtual network (VNet) in Azure. 

Azure Stack

Azure Stack Edge

Two new Azure Stack Edge rugged devices are available

Customers can perform machine learning and gain quick insights at the edge by running the Azure Stack Edge Pro R with NVIDIA’s powerful T4 GPU and the lightweight, portable Azure Stack Edge Mini R. Both devices are designed to operate in the harshest environments at remote locations. 

Azure Stack Edge is now available with GPUs

Customers can run visualization, inferencing, and machine learning at the edge with the Azure Stack Edge Pro series powered by the NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU. This unlocks a broad set of new edge scenarios, such as automatically recognizing license plates for efficient retail curbside pickup, and detecting defects in real time in products on a manufacturing assembly line.

Azure Stack HCI

Preview of Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS) on Azure Stack HCI

AKS on Azure Stack HCI enables customers to deploy and manage containerized apps at scale on Azure Stack HCI, just as they can run AKS within Azure. This now provides a consistent, secure, and fully managed Kubernetes experience for customers who want to use Azure Stack HCI within their datacenters. Sign up for the preview of AKS on Azure Stack HCI.

Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stack Hub is now available with GPUs

To power visualization intense apps, we’ve partnered with AMD to bring the AMD Mi25 GPU to Azure Stack Hub, which allows users to share the GPU in an efficient way. The NVIDIA V100 Tensor Core GPU enables customers to run compute intense machine learning workloads in disconnected or partially connected scenarios. The NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU provides visualization, inferencing, and machine learning for less compute intense workloads

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

Compute

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series are available in Southeast Asia

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are available in Southeast Asia in multiple availability zones.

Storage

Azure Blob storage object replication

Object replication is a new capability for block blobs that lets you replicate your data from your blob container in one storage account to another anywhere in Azure.

Object replication unblocks a new set of common replication scenarios:

• Minimize latency: users consume the data locally rather than issuing cross-region read requests.
• Increase efficiency: compute clusters process the same set of objects locally in different regions.
• Optimize data distribution: data consolidated in a single location for processing/analytics and then distribute only resulting dashboards to your offices worldwide.
• Minimize cost: tier down your data to Archive upon replication completion using lifecycle management policies to minimize the cost.

Change feed support is generally available for Azure Blob Storage

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

Compute

New Azure VMs for general purpose and memory intensive workloads

The new D v4 and E v4 series Azure Virtual Machines, now generally available, are based on the Intel Xeon Platinum 8272CL custom processor, which can achieve up to 3.4Ghz all core turbo frequency. These new Azure Virtual Machines do not provide any temporary storage. If you require temporary storage select the latest Dd v4 and Ed v4 Azure virtual machines, which are also generally available.

• The D v4 / Ds v4 virtual machine sizes offer a combination of vCPUs and memory able to meet the requirements associated with most general-purpose workloads. You can attach Standard SSDs and Standard HDDs disk storage to the D v4 virtual machines. If you prefer to use Premium SSD or Ultra Disk storage, please select the Ds v4 virtual machines.
• The E v4 / Es v4 virtual machines feature up to 504 GiB of RAM and are ideal for various memory-intensive enterprise applications. You can attach Standard SSDs and Standard HDDs disk storage to the E v4 VMs. If you prefer to use Premium SSD or Ultra Disk storage, please select the Es v4 virtual machines.

Storage

AzCopy: new version available

AzCopy v10.6 has released with support for:

• Sync command now includes access control lists (ACLs) between supported resources (e.g. Windows and Azure Files) using persist-smb-permissions flag
• Sync also includes SMB properties (Created Time, Last Write Time, and attributes such as Read Only) between supported resources (e.g. Windows and Azure Files) using the persist-smb-info flag
• Support for higher block & blob size.  Blob block size up to 4,000 MiB supported.  This provides block blob sizes up to 190.7 TiB (4,000 MiB x 50,000 blocks)
• Support for Blob Versioning using list-of-versions flag for both download and delete operations

Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2: access control list recursive update (public preview)

The ability to recursively propagate access control list (ACL) changes from a parent directory to its existing child items for Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) Gen2 is now available in public preview. This public preview is available globally in all Azure regions, through PowerShell, .NET SDK, and Python SDK.

Networking

Azure Stack

Azure Stack Hub

Stream Analytics can be run on Azure Stack Hub

Azure Stream Analytics now can be run on Azure Stack Hub as an IoT Edge module. Configurations have been added to the IoT Edge module which allows it to interact with blob storage, Event Hubs, and IoT Hubs running in an Azure Stack Hub subscription. Customers can build truly hybrid architectures for stream processing in your own private, autonomous cloud, which can be connected or disconnected with cloud-native apps using consistent Azure services on-premises.

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

Compute

New GPU NCas T4 v3 VMs (preview)

The NCas T4 v3 Series virtual machine is a new addition to the Azure GPU family specifically designed for the AI and machine learning workloads. The VMs feature 4 NVIDIA T4 GPUs with 16 GB of memory each, up to 64 non-multithreaded AMD EPYC 7V12(Rome) processor cores, and 448 GiB of system memory. These virtual machines are ideal to run ML and AI workloads utilizing Cuda, TensorFlow, Pytorch, Caffe, and other Frameworks or graphics workloads using NVIDIA GRID technology. 

Azure Virtual Machines DCsv2-series in West US 2

Confidential computing DCsv2-series virtual machines (VMs) are now available in two availability zones in West US 2.

Storage

Azure Blob storage: Network File System 3.0 protocol support region expansion (preview)

Azure Blob storage is the only storage platform that supports NFS 3.0 protocol over object storage natively (no gateway or data copying required), with crucial object storage economics. NFS 3.0 support to block blob storage accounts with premium performance public preview regions now include: US East, US Central, US West Central, Australia Southeast, North Europe, UK West, Korea Central, Korea South, and Canada Central. 

Azure Blob storage: Soft Delete for Containers (preview)

Soft delete for containers expands upon Azure Blob Storage’s existing capabilities such as soft delete for blobs, account delete locking, and immutable blobs, making our data protection and restore capabilities even better. When container soft delete is enabled for a storage account, any deleted container and their contents are retained in Azure Storage for the period that you specify. During the retention period, you can restore previously deleted containers and any blobs within them. Container soft delete is available in preview in the following regions: France Central, Canada East, and Canada Central. There is no additional charge to enable container soft delete. Data in soft deleted containers is billed at the same rate as active data.

Azure Ultra Disk: generally available in more regions and Availability Zones

Azure Ultra Disks offer high throughput, high IOPS, and consistent low latency disk storage for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). It is now available in Australia East, East Asia, Brazil South, and Canada Central. Moreover, Azure Ultra Disk support is now expanded to the 3 Availability Zones in US East 2 and Japan East.

Azure Data Box Disk is now available in South Africa and China

Data Box Disk is an SSD-disk-based option for offline data transfer to Azure. It’s ideal for a recurring or one-time data migration of up to 40 TB to Azure and is especially well-suited for data migration from multiple remote or branch offices. Azure Data Box Disk is now Generally Available in South Africa and China. This is in addition to the regions where Data Box Disk is now generally available. 

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

Compute

SQL Server FCI on Shared Disks for SQL Server on virtual machines

Azure Shared Disks for SQL Server Failover Cluster Instance (SQL FCI) on Azure IaaS is now in general availability. Azure Shared disks for SQL FCI enables lift and shift migrations for the most commonly used high availability configuration on-premises to Azure IaaS.

Storage

New regions for Azure Blob storage object replication (preview)

Object replication is a new capability for block blobs that lets you replicate your data from your blob container in one storage account to another anywhere in Azure. Microsoft has expanded the preview regions to include East US 2 and Central US.

Azure Blob storage: Network File System 3.0 protocol support (preview)

Network File System (NFS) 3.0 protocol support for Azure Blob storage is now in preview. Azure Blob storage is the only storage platform that supports NFS 3.0 protocol over object storage natively (no gateway or data copying required), with crucial object storage economics. This new level of support helps with large scale read-heavy sequential access workloads where data will be ingested once and minimally modified further including large scale analytic data, backup and archive, NFS apps for seismic and subsurface processing, media rendering, genomic sequencing, and line-of-business applications. NFS 3.0 is available to block blob storage accounts with premium performance in the following regions: US East, US Central, and Canada Central. Support for GPV2 accounts with standard tier performance will be announced soon. During the preview, test data stored in your NFS 3.0-enabled storage accounts will be billed at the same capacity rate (per GB per month) as Azure Blob storage. Pricing for transactions is subject to change and will be determined when generally available.

Azure File Sync agent v10.1

Azure File Sync agent v10.1 is available and it’s now on Microsoft Update and Microsoft Download Center.

Improvements and issues that are fixed:

• Azure private endpoint support
  • Sync traffic to the Storage Sync Service can now be sent to a private endpoint. This enables tunneling over an ExpressRoute or VPN connection. To learn more, see Configuring Azure File Sync network endpoints.
• Files Synced metric will now display progress while a large sync is running, rather than at the end.
• Miscellaneous reliability improvements for agent installation, cloud tiering, sync and telemetry.

Installation instructions are documented in KB4522411.

Networking

Upcoming billing changes to Azure Bandwidth

On a rolling basis throughout September 2020, Microsoft will move Bandwidth to a source–destination billing model. Additionally, metering will be divided into inter-region meter IDs. As a result, Bandwidth charges for inter-region data transfers will either remain the same or decrease. First 5 GB of outbound data transfers will remain free of charge and the current data volume tiers will be replaced by one flat price.