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

Geo Zone Redundant Storage in Azure in preview

Geo Zone Redundant Storage provides a great balance of high performance, high availability, and disaster recovery and is beneficial when building highly available applications or services in Azure. Geo Zone Redundant Storage helps achieve higher data resiliency by doing the following:

• Synchronously writing three replicas of your data across multiple Azure Availability Zones, such as zone-redundant storage today, protecting from cluster, datacenter, or entire zone failure.

• Asynchronously replicating the data to another region within the same geo into a single zone, such as locally redundant storage, protecting from a regional outage.

Ultra Disks generally available

Microsoft Azure Ultra Disks is the new managed disks offering which is now generally available for running data intensive business critical workloads on cloud requiring high IO performance and low latency. With the introduction of Ultra Disk Storage, Azure includes four types of persistent disk: Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. This portfolio gives you price and performance options tailored to meet the requirements of every workload.

Azure File Sync agent v7.2

Azure File Sync agent v7.2 update rollup is on Microsoft Update and Microsoft Download Center.

Improvements and issues that are fixed:

• Storage Sync Agent (FileSyncSvc) crashes if the proxy configuration is null.
• Server endpoint will start BCDR (error 0x80c80257 – ECS_E_BCDR_IN_PROGRESS) if multiple endpoints on the server have the same name.
• Cloud tiering reliability improvements.

More information about this update rollup:

• This update is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 installations that have Azure File Sync agent version 4.0.1.0 or later installed.
• The agent version of this update rollup is 7.2.0.0.
• A restart may be required if files are in use during the update rollup installation.
• Installation instructions are documented in KB4490497.

Azure Files Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS) Authentication

General Availability of Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS) authentication for Azure Files. By enabling integration with Azure AD DS, you can mount your Azure file share over SMB using Azure AD credentials from Azure AD DS domain joined Windows VMs with NTFS ACLs enforced.

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

Azure Dedicated Host

Azure Dedicated Host is a new Azure service that enables you to run your organization’s Linux and Windows virtual machines on single-tenant physical servers. Azure Dedicated Hosts provide you with visibility and control to help address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. Azure Dedicated Host is in preview in most Azure regions.

Azure marketplace charges are available in Azure Cost Management for Pay-As-You-Go customers

Azure marketplace charges within Cost Analysis tool for Pay-As-You-Go customers are available. As a part of this preview you can analyze marketplace charges alongside Azure service charges within Cost Analysis and reconcile Azure marketplace invoice using both Cost Analysis and a new usage csv download API.

Network security group improvements

New improvements have been added to network security group (NSG), which filters network traffic to and from various Azure resources:

• Specify ICMP as the protocol in your NSG rules, in addition to TCP, UDP, or Any. 
• Override the default Azure platform considerations by creating an NSG rule with the following service tags. Please exercise caution when using these tags.
  • ​​AzurePlatformDNS for DNS 
  • AzurePlatformIMDS for IMDS 
  • AzurePlatformLKM for Windows licensing (Key Management Service)

Most cost-effective storage offering

Microsoft has dropped Azure Archive Storage prices by up to 50 percent in some regions. The new pricing is effective immediately.

New AMD-based Azure VMs for general purpose and memory intensive workloads

New Azure virtual machines part of the Dv3 and Ev3-series, optimized for general purpose and memory intensive workloads, are in Preview. The new general purpose Da_v3 and Das_v3 Azure VM-series provide up to 64 vCPUs, 256 GiBs of RAM and 1,600 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage. Das_v3 Azure VM-series supports Premium SSD disk storage. The new memory optimized Ea_v3 and Eas_v3 Azure VM-series provide up to 64 vCPUs, 432 GiBs of RAM and 1,600 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage. Eas_v3 Azure VM-series supports Premium SSD disk storage.

M-series virtual machines (VMs) are generally available in the Brazil South Region

Azure M-series VMs are available in the Brazil South region. M-series VMs offer configurations with memory from 192 GB to 3.8 TiB (4 TB) RAM and are certified for SAP HANA.

Azure Geo and Zone Redundant Storage in public preview

Azure Geo and Zone Redundant Storage (GZRS) helps customers achieve higher data resiliency by Synchronously writing three replicas of your data across multiple Availability Zones and Asynchronously replicating the data to another region within the same geo into a single zone (like LRS today) protecting from a regional outage.

Azure Files Active Directory (Azure AD) authentication with Azure AD domain services is generally available

Azure Files offers fully managed file shares in the cloud that are accessible via the industry standard SMB protocol. Integration with Azure AD enables SMB access to Azure file shares using Azure AD credentials from Azure AD domain services domain joined Windows VMs.

Azure Firewall feature updates for July 2019

Here are the Azure Firewall feature updates for July 2019:

• Multiple public IPs is generally available in all Azure public regions.
• Availability Zones is now generally available. 
• SQL FQDN filtering is now in preview in all Azure regions.
• Azure HDInsight FQDN tag is now in preview in all Azure public regions. 
• Central management using partner solutions

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

Azure File Sync supports the firewall and virtual network setting on storage accounts

To configure your Azure File Sync deployment to work with the firewall and virtual network setting, perform the following steps:

• Go to the storage account you want to secure.
• Click on the settings menu called Firewalls and virtual networks.
• Click on allow access from Selected networks.
• To enable servers to sync to the Azure file share, verify the server’s IP address or virtual network has been added.
• To enable the Storage Sync Service to access the storage account and Azure file share, verify the Allow trusted Microsoft services to access this storage account is selected.
• Click Save to save your settings.

This feature works with any Azure File Sync agent version.

Azure File Sync agent v7.2 update

Improvements and issues that are fixed:

• Storage Sync Agent (FileSyncSvc) crashes if the proxy configuration is null.
• Server endpoint will start BCDR (error 0x80c80257 – ECS_E_BCDR_IN_PROGRESS) if multiple endpoints on the server have the same name.
• Cloud tiering reliability improvements.

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.

New features to IPv6 support for Azure VNets

In addition to the preview capabilities announced on April 23, IPv6 for Azure VNET public preview now includes:  

• Standard IPv6 Public Load Balancer support to create resilient, scalable applications which includes:
  • IPv6 health probe to determine which backend pool instances are healthy and thus can receive new connections. 
  • Outbound Rules provide full declarative control over outbound connectivity to precisely tune your network for scale and resiliency.
  • Multiple Front-end Configurations enable a single load balancer to use multiple IPv6 Public IP addresses – the same frontend protocol and port can be reused across frontend addresses.
• Instance-level Public IP provides IPv6 Internet connectivity directly to Individual VM’s
• Azure Portal support for the preview now includes interactive create/edit/delete of dual stack (IPv4/IPv6) Virtual Networks and subnets, IPv6 Network Security Group Rules, IPv6 User defined routes, and IPv6 Public IP’s. 

Azure Security Center launched new network recommendations

There are new and updated Azure Security Center networking recommendations. For more information, see the Network Recommendations section in the Azure Security Center documentation.

Proximity placement groups are in preview

A proximity placement group is an Azure Virtual Machine logical grouping capability that you can use to decrease network latency among VMs. When the VMs are deployed within the same proximity placement group, the VMs are physically located as close as possible to each other. Proximity placement groups are particularly useful to address the requirements of latency-sensitive workloads.

New 48 vCPUs Azure Virtual Machine sizes are available

New 48 vCPUs sizes for the Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3, Esv3, Fsv2, and Lsv2 Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are available so you can better match your workload requirements.

Azure Mv2-series VMs up to 6 TB of memory are available for the US West 2 region

Azure Mv2-series virtual machines are hyper-threaded and feature Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180M 2.5 GHz (Skylake) processors, offering up to 208 vCPU in 3 TB and 6 TB memory configurations. Mv2 virtual machines provide unparalleled computational performance to support large in-memory databases and workloads such as SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton. Mv2 VMs are available in US East, US East 2 regions, and US West 2 regions. Mv2 VMs in Europe West, Europe North, and Southeast Asia regions will become available in the coming months.

Availability Zones support is available for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) in preview

Availability Zones support is now available for AKS in preview. Protect applications and data from datacenter failures with redundancies across Availability Zones and achieve higher availability and resiliency for worker nodes with Availability Zones, used in conjunction with Azure Standard Load Balancer.

Network Performance Monitor in Central India

Network Performance Monitor is now available in Central India region.

Azure Lab Services updates

• Azure Lab Services has a new instance size available: Medium (nested virtualization)
• Azure Lab Services has removed the unlimited option from quota per user so lab owners can intentionally choose a specific number of hours needed for each lab to help save costs.
• Azure Lab Services supports the ability to reset passwords and to provide added support for Ubuntu images.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack 1907 update

Azure Stack 1907 Update is available. Check the release notes for more details.

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

Pubic preview for large file shares (100 TiB) on standard tier

Announced the public preview of large file shares for Azure Files standard tier. Azure File Sync, until now, scaling cloud file shares beyond 5 TiB required changing the paradigm for accessing data. The preview of a larger and higher scale standard tier for Azure Files, is available to all Azure customers. This preview significantly improves your experience by increasing standard file shares’ capacity and performance limits. In select regions, standard file shares in general purpose accounts can support the following larger limits:

Performance limits for a single file remain the same at 1 TiB, 1000 IOPS, and 60 MiB/s. Standard file shares are backed by hard disk drives. If the workload is latency sensitive, you should consider Azure Files premium tier, that is backed by solid-state drives.

New larger B-series VM sizes with flexible CPU usage

Microsoft has released three new B-series sizes: B12ms, B16ms and B20ms. These are lower cost VMs with flexible CPU usage.

Azure Data Box Heavy is generally available

Azure Data Box Heavy has reached general availability in the US and EU. Data Box Heavy is designed for a much larger scale than the original Data Box. Data Box Heavy’s one petabyte of raw capacity and multiple 40 Gbps connectors mean that a datacenter’s worth of data can be moved into Azure in just a few weeks.

Network Watcher is Generally Available in South Africa

Network Watcher is a cloud based solution for troubleshooting and monitoring networks in Azure. Azure Network Watcher is generally available in South Africa North region. 

Azure Ephemeral OS Disk is Generally Available

Ephemeral OS disks are created on the local virtual machine (VM) storage and not saved to the remote Azure Storage. Ephemeral OS disks work well for stateless workloads, where applications are tolerant of individual VM failures, but are more affected by VM deployment time or reimaging the individual VM instances. With Ephemeral OS disk, you get lower read/write latency to the OS disk and faster VM reimage. Ephemeral OS disk is free i.e., you incur no storage cost for the OS disk. You can still be charged for any data disks attached to the VM. You can use either the Marketplace or Custom or Gallery Images to deploy VM/VM Scale Set (VMSS) with Ephemeral OS Disk. This functionality is available in all Azure regions.

Azure Monitor for VMs is available in East and South East Australia regions

Azure Monitor for VMs is now available in East Australia and South East Australia. Azure Monitor for VMs monitors your Azure virtual machines and virtual machine scale sets. The service analyzes the performance and health of your Windows and Linux VMs, monitoring their processes and their dependencies on other resources and external processes.

Azure Migrate is enhanced

Azure Migrate is now enhanced and can help you discover, assess, and migrate applications, infrastructure, and data from your on-premises environments to Azure. You can centrally track progress of your migration journey across multiple Microsoft and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) tools in Azure Migrate.

This release includes the following functionality:

• Extensible approach with choice across Microsoft and popular ISV assessment and migration tools

• Integrated experience for discovery, assessment, and migration with end-to-end progress tracking for servers and databases

• Server Assessment and Server Migration for large-scale VMware, Hyper-V, and physical server migrations

• Database Assessment and Database Migration across various database targets including Azure SQL Database and Managed Instance

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

General availability of Azure Premium Files

Premium Files is a new performance tier for Azure Files and is designed for IO intensive workloads with low latency and higher throughput requirements. Premium tier provides 20x capacity, 100x IOPS, and 170x throughput as compared to the existing standard tier. Premium Files stores data on the latest Solid-State Drives (SSDs), which makes it suitable for wide variety of workloads like file services, databases, persistent storage for containers, content and collaboration repositories, analytics, home directories, high variable and batch workloads, among many others. 

Azure Bastion Public Preview

Azure Bastion enables more secure and seamless RDP and SSH access to Azure Virtual machines directly in the portal (over port 443) without the need of any public IP on the virtual machine. Additional details are available on the Azure Bastion product page, and Azure Bastion product documentation page.

Azure Firewall: public preview for multiple public IPs and Availability Zones

Azure Firewall now supports multiple public IPs and availability zones in public preview using PowerShell and templates:

• Multiple public IPs
• Availability zones

Just-in-time access supports Azure Firewall

When a user requests access to a VM with a JIT policy, Security Center first checks that the user has Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) permissions to request access to a VM with a JIT policy. If the user has permissions and the request is approved, Security Center automatically configures the NSG and the Azure Firewall rules to allow inbound traffic.

ExpressRoute supports up to 4 circuits from the same peering location into the VNet

ExpressRoute now supports up to 4 circuits from a single peering location connected to an ExpressRoute virtual network gateway, which was previously limited to a single circuit in a peering location. This is generally available in Azure Public.

Preview Refresh for Azure DNS Private Zones

Announced the Refresh release for Azure DNS private zones (preview). The Preview Refresh introduces new functionality and lifts several restrictions that public preview had.

Availability of Microsoft cloud datacenter regions in the Middle East

Microsoft Azure and Office 365 are now generally available from datacenter regions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), with plans for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform to be available by the end of 2019.

VM Health feature now supports new OS’ and is available in new regions

VM Health feature now supports new OS’ and is available in new regions

VM Health feature included in Azure monitor for VMs is now available for VMs that are running on Windows 2012 R2 and 2019. Additionally, VM Health feature is also available in cases where the associated workspace is in SEA (South East Asia), UKS (UK South), and CCAN (Canada Central) regions.

Public preview of monitoring VM scale sets

Public preview of monitoring Windows and Linux VM scale sets from within the scale set resource blade.

M-series VMs are available in the South Africa North region

Azure M-series VMs are now available in the US South Central region. M-series VMs offer configurations with memory from 192 GB to 3.8TiB (4TB) RAM and are certified for SAP HANA.

GPU Optimized Visualization VMs now available in new regions

NVv3-Series VMs are now available in South Central US, West US, West Europe and North Europe Azure regions.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack update

This update includes new improvements, and fixes for Azure Stack. This article describes the contents of the 1906 update package.

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

Web Application Firewall (WAF) for Azure Front Door service is generally available

Customers can use WAF to define security policies that allow, block, forward or rate limit access to their web applications delivered through Azure Front Door.

• A WAF security policy may consist of an ordered list of custom rules and Azure managed pre-configured rulesets.
• Custom rules are based on a combination of client IP addresses, geolocation, http parameters, request methods and size constraints.
• The pre-configured default rule set can be enabled to protect your applications from OWASP top 10 threats.
• New or updated WAF configurations are deployed globally within minutes, letting you respond quickly to changing attack patterns.
• WAF for Azure Front Door is integrated with Azure Monitor and the logs can be accessed through an Azure storage account, Azure Event Hub or Azure Log Analytics.

DevTest Labs supports the Shared Image Gallery feature

It enables lab users to access images from a shared location while creating lab resources. It also helps you build structure and organization around your custom-managed VM images.

High-Performance Computing Virtual Machines are available in West US 2, East US

HC-series Virtual Machines, designed to provide supercomputer-grade performance and scalability with the best price-performance on the public cloud, are generally available in West US 2 and East US.

Azure File Sync is GA for Azure Government cloud

Azure File Sync is generally available for Azure Government cloud. Azure File Sync in Government Cloud can be used with the same v6 agent that a customer would use in public cloud. It is at feature parity with what’s available publicly.

Azure Shared Image Gallery are generally available

Shared Image Gallery provides a simple way to share your applications with others in your organization, within or across Azure Active Directory (AD) tenants and regions. This enables you to expedite regional expansion or DevOps processes and simplify your cross-region HA/DR setup.

Azure DevTest Labs: PowerShell module to simplify management of labs

You can now make use of Az.DevTestLabs, a PowerShell module to simplify the management of Azure DevTest Labs. It provides composable functions to create, query, update and delete labs, virtual machines, custom images and environments. 

Advanced data security for SQL servers on IaaS

Advanced data security is now available for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines. Advanced data security for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines currently includes functionality for surfacing and mitigating potential database vulnerabilities and detecting anomalous activities that could indicate a threat to your server.

Adaptive Network Hardening in Security Center id generally available

Security Center learns the network traffic and connectivity patterns of Azure workloads and provides NSG rule recommendations, for Internet facing virtual machines. This helps our customer better configure their network access policies and limit their exposure to attacks. 

Azure Application Gateway Web Application Firewall custom rules are Generally Available

Custom rules for WAF_v2 allow customers to create their own rules with IP/IP range or String based matching conditions. For example, customers will be able to create rules which block requests from a specific IP range, or those matching a specific regular expression in the request’s header/cookie/URI/queryString/form elements. Users can also join multiple matching conditions into a single custom rule. More details can be found here. 

Update rollup for Azure File Sync Agent

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

Generation 2 virtual machines in Azure in Public Preview

Generation 2 virtual machines use the new UEFI-based boot architecture vs. the BIOS-based architecture used by Generation 1 VMs. The new architecture enables customers to:

• Build large virtual machines (up to 12TB)
• Provision OS disks sizes that exceed 2TB, and
• Leverage advanced security capabilities like SecureBoot and Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) to secure their Virtual Machines.

If you want to take advantage of these features, you can now create Generation 2 virtual machines in Azure. For a complete list of capabilities, limitations and details associated with the deployment of Generation 2 virtual machines on Azure, please refer to this documentation.

Azure DDoS Protection Standard introduces DDoS Alert integration with Azure Security Center

DDoS Protection Standard customers can view DDoS Alerts in Azure Security Center (ASC) and this capability is generally available for all ASC and DDoS Standard customers. These DDoS alerts will be available for review in the Security Center in near real-time without any setup or manual integrations required and will provide details on DDoS attacks detected and automatically mitigated by the service.

General availability of Azure NetApp Files

Azure NetApp Files, the industry’s first bare-metal cloud file storage and data management service, is general availability (GA). Azure NetApp Files is an Azure first-party service for migrating and running the most demanding enterprise file-workloads in the cloud including databases, SAP, and high-performance computing applications with no code changes. Azure NetApp Files is a fully managed cloud service with full Azure portal integration. It’s sold and supported exclusively by Microsoft. Customers can seamlessly migrate and run applications in the cloud without worrying about procuring or managing storage infrastructure. Additionally, customers can purchase Azure NetApp Files and get support through existing Azure agreements, with no up-front or separate term agreement.

OpenVPN support in Azure VPN gateways

Microsoft announced the General Availability (GA) of OpenVPN protocol in Azure VPN gateways for P2S connectivity. Form more details you can read this article.

Azure Mv2 Virtual Machines are generally available

Azure Mv2-series virtual machines are hyper-threaded and feature Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8180M 2.5GHz (Skylake) processor, offering up to 208 vCPU in 3TB and 6 TB memory configurations. Mv2 virtual machines provide unparalleled computational performance to support large in-memory databases and workloads such as SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton. Mv2-series VMs are certified by SAP for SAP HANA OLTP and OLAP production workloads. Mv2 VMs are available in US East and US East 2 regions. Mv2 VMs in U.S. West 2, Europe West, Europe North and Southeast Asia regions will become available in the coming months. 

Azure Stack

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

Public IP Prefix

A Public IP prefix is a reserved range of static IP addresses that can be assigned to your subscription. You can use a prefix to simplify IP address management in Azure. Knowledge of the range ahead of time eliminates the need to change firewall rules as you assign IP addresses to new resources. This predictability significantly reduces management overhead when scaling in Azure. Public IP Prefix is available in all Azure public regions, Government cloud regions and China cloud regions.

Azure Premium Files preview

Azure Premium Files preview is available. Premium Files is a new performance tier for Azure Files, which is designed for IO intensive workloads with low latency and higher throughput requirements. Premium files storage provides consistent low latency and offers high throughput and IOPS that scales with your storage. Premium tier provides 20x capacity, 100x IOPS and 170x throughput as compared to the existing standard tier. For more details, see the Premium Files redefines limits for Azure Files blog.

Update rollup for Azure File Sync Agent: May 2019

An update rollup for the Azure File Sync agent was released today.

Improvements and issues that are fixed:

• Windows Admin Center fails to display the agent version and server endpoint configuration on servers which have Azure File Sync agent version 6.0 installed.

More information about this update rollup:

• This update is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 installations that have Azure File Sync agent version 4.0.1.0 or later installed.
• The agent version of this update rollup is 6.1.0.0.
• A restart may be required if files are in use during the update rollup installation.
• Installation instructions are documented in KB4489737.

Azure File Sync is supported in West US 2 and West Central US

Azure File Sync is now supported in West US 2 and West Central US

Azure Cost Management multi-cloud for AWS is in preview

Azure Cost Management for AWS is now in public preview and you can manage your AWS spend along your Azure spend in Azure Cost Management. Features like cost analysis and budgets are availble as part of this feature as well, helping simplify your cost management practice on multi-cloud scenarios.

Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage is generally available

Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) for Azure Storage provides an additional layer of security intelligence that detects unusual and potentially harmful attempts to access or exploit storage accounts. This layer of protection allows you to protect and address concerns about potential threats to your storage accounts as they occur, without needing to be an expert in security. To learn more, see Advanced Threat Protection for Azure Storage  or read about the ATP for Storage price in Azure Security Center pricing page.

Ephemeral OS Disk in Public Preview

Ephemeral OS disks work well for stateless workloads, where applications are tolerant of individual VM failures and are more concerned about the time it takes to deploy at scale or to reimage the individual VMs. In addition, Ephemeral OS disk is free i.e., you incur no storage cost for the Ephemeral OS disk.

Azure Serial Console updated

The Azure Serial Console is an invaluable tool in troubleshooting scenarios where you may be unable to connect to your VM. In addition to VMs, you may now use the Serial Console to troubleshoot and diagnose connectivity issues with your Virtual Machine Scale Set (VMSS) instances. To use Serial Console on a VMSS instance, enable boot diagnostics on the VMSS model and ensure that your instances have been upgraded to the latest model. Use Serial Console just as you would with a VM to troubleshoot and diagnose connectivity issues. In addition, improved language support means that you can now troubleshoot your VMs and VMSS instances in a variety of languages.

Adaptive network hardening in public preview

One of the biggest attack surfaces for workloads running in the public cloud are connections to and from the public Internet. Our customers find it hard to know which Network Security Group (NSG) rules should be in place to make sure that Azure workloads are only available to required source ranges. With this feature, Security Center learns the network traffic and connectivity patterns of Azure workloads and provides NSG rule recommendations, for Internet facing virtual machines. This helps our customer better configure their network access policies and limit their exposure to attacks. 

Azure ExpressRoute is generally available in additional locations

Azure ExpressRoute lets you extend your on-premises networks into the Microsoft cloud over a private connection facilitated by a connectivity provider. The ExpressRoute footprint is expanding to eight new locations:

• Amsterdam2
• Frankfurt
• London2
• Perth
• Silicon Valley2
• Taipei
• Washington DC2
• Zurich

Red Hat Enterprise Linux BYOS images now available

Red Hat Enterprise Linux images are now available as both BYOS and PAYG offers.

Azure Lab Services update: Address range feature available

In Azure Lab Services was added the ability to provide address range of virtual machines for the labs. This is useful for scenarios where licensing servers for an application on the lab virtual machines only accept a specific range of IP addresses.

Azure Virtual Machine PowerOff available with fast shutdown

The Azure Compute Virtual Machines API has now been updated to allow users to forcefully skip the graceful shutdown period when executing a power off command. This may be useful in situations where a VM may need to be quickly powered off and the risk for data loss or corruption can be ignored. To use this feature, ensure the skipShutdown flag is added to your API or SDK calls.

High-Performance Computing Virtual Machines in new regions

HB-series, designed to provide supercomputer-grade performance and scalability with the best price-performance on the public cloud, are Generally Available in South Central US and Western Europe.

Reserved instance pricing in the Dev/Test Offer

Reserved instances discounts are available for VMs and Azure SQL Database instances created in Dev/Test offer subscriptions. Dev/Test offer provides you a cost-effective way to run your development and testing workloads and with the support of Reserved instances, you can enjoy additional savings and have more purchase controls for your development and test 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

Azure VMware Solutions

Microsoft Corp.  and Dell Technologies announced they are expanding their partnership to address a wider range of customer needs and help accelerate digital transformations. Through this collaboration, the companies will deliver a fully native, supported, and certified VMware cloud infrastructure on Microsoft Azure.

Azure VMware Solutions are built on VMware Cloud Foundation, a comprehensive offering of software defined compute, storage, networking and management, deployed in Azure. With these solutions, customers can capitalize on VMware’s broadly deployed and trusted cloud infrastructure while experiencing the power of Microsoft Azure.

Azure VMware Solutions give customers the power to seamlessly migrate, extend and run existing VMware workloads from on-premises environments to Azure without the need to re-architect applications or retool operations. Customers will be able to build, run, manage, and secure new and existing applications across VMware environments and Microsoft Azure while extending a single model for operations based on established tools, skills and processes as part of a hybrid cloud strategy.  Some of the more popular customer scenarios Azure VMware Solutions will support are app migration and datacenter expansion, disaster recovery, and business continuity and modern application development.

Azure Firewall – Price Reduction

Azure Firewall pricing includes a fixed hourly cost ($1.25/firewall/hour) and a variable per GB processed cost to support auto scaling. Microsoft are announcing a price reduction, effective 01/05/2019, for the firewall per GB cost to $0.016/GB (-46.6%) to ensure that high throughput customers maintain cost effectiveness. There is no change to the fixed hourly cost.

Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 and WAF v2 SKUs

Application Gateway is Azure’s Application Delivery Controller as-a-service offering which provides customers with layer 7 load balancing, security and WAF functionality.

Azure Application Gateway Standard v2 and WAF v2 SKUs are generally available and fully supported with a 99.95 SLA. The v2 SKUs also offer the following additional capabilities to Application Gateway and WAF:

• Faster provisioning and configuration update time.
• Static VIPs ensure that the Application Gateway VIP will not change over its lifecycle.
• Autoscaling allows elasticity to your application enabling it to scale up or down based on application traffic pattern. This also eliminates the need to run Application Gateway at peak provisioned capacity, thus significantly saving cost.
• Improved performance offers better application performance and also helps reduce overall cost.
• Zone redundancy enables your Application Gateway to survive zonal failures, thereby offering better resilience to your applications.
• Header Rewrite allows you to add, remove, or update HTTP request and response headers allowing applications to enable various scenarios like HSTS support, securing cookies, changing cache controls, etc. without changing application code.

For more information about the capabilities available, please visit the Application Gateway documentation webpage.

Azure File Sync v6 

Azure File Sync Agent v6 is available.

Improvements and issues that are fixed

• Agent auto-update support
• Support for Azure file share ACLs
• Parallel upload and download sync sessions for a server endpoint
• New Cloud Tiering cmdlets to get volume and tiering status
• Support for FIPS mode
• Miscellaneous reliability improvements for cloud tiering and sync

For more details, see KB4489736.

Agent installation notes

• This update is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 installations.
• Azure File Sync agent version 4.0.1.0 or a later version is required to upgrade existing agent installations.
• A restart may be required if files are in use during the update rollup installation.
• The agent version for the v6 release is 6.0.0.0.
• Installation instructions are documented in KB4489736.

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

Gateway Transit support for Global VNet Peering

Global VNet Peering seamlessly connects Azure virtual networks across regions. After virtual networks are peered, they appear as one for connectivity purposes. Traffic between resources in the peered virtual networks is completely private and stays on the Microsoft Backbone. Gateway Transit is a VNet Peering property that enables one virtual network to use the VPN gateway in the peered virtual network for cross-premises connectivity. Previously, support for Gateway Transit was limited to peering within the same region. Now, Gateway Transit is supported for Global VNet Peering in all Azure public regions, Azure China regions, and Azure Government regions. Gateway Transit enables you to use a peered virtual network’s gateway instead of creating a new gateway for connectivity. As you increase your workloads in Azure, you need to scale your networks across regions and virtual networks to keep up with the growth. VNet peering’s Gateway Transit can help simplify your network architecture.

Full IPv6 support for Azure Virtual Networks

Dual Stack IPv4/IPv6 connectivity with full IPv6 support for Virtual Networks is now available. This lets you bring your private IPv6 space into Azure and enables connectivity over IPv6 within your Virtual Networks. With this, you’re able to address IPv4 depletion, meet regulatory requirements, and expand into the growing mobile and IoT markets with your Azure-based applications.

Azure Cost Management generally available for Pay-As-You-Go customers

The general availability of Azure Cost Management features for all Pay-As-You-Go and Azure Government customers will greatly enhance the ability to analyze and proactively manage  cloud costs. These features will allow you to analyze your cost data, configure budgets to drive accountability for cloud costs, and export pre-configured reports on a schedule to support deeper data analysis within your own systems. This release for Pay-As-You-Go customers also provides invoice reconciliation support in the Azure portal via a usage csv download of all charges applicable to your invoices.

New experience and APIs for purchasing Azure reservations

The new user experience also shows purchase recommendations for VM size that have consistent usage over the last 30 days, to help you select the right VM size. You can now add multiple products to your cart and purchase them together from the Azure portal, or use the reservation APIs to purchase individual products.

Rewrite HTTP headers with Azure Application Gateway

Rewriting HTTP headers in Azure Application Gateway is now supported. You can add, remove, or update HTTP request and response headers while the request and response packets move between the client and backend application. You can also add conditions to ensure that the headers you specify are rewritten only when the conditions are met. Rewriting headers helps you accomplish several important scenarios such as removing port information from X-Forwarded-For headers, adding security-related header fields like HSTS/ X-XSS-Protection, removing response header fields which may reveal sensitive information, etc.

Azure Backup support to move Recovery Services vaults across subscriptions and resource groups

Azure Backup support for move functionality for recovery services vaults where you can migrate a vault between subscriptions and resource groups with a few steps, in minimal downtime and without any data-loss of old backups. You can move the vault across resource groups and subscriptions. This is very helpful in scenarios like expiry of old subscription, moving from EA to CSP type subscription, organizational and departmental changes or separation between QA environment and production environment.  Post migration, all the settings, backup policies and configurations in the vault are retained, including all backup and recovery points created in the past inside the vault. You can restore from retained backup history in the vault regardless of whether the VM is moved with the vault or not to the target subscription.

Azure Availability Zones in UK South and in Japan East

Azure Availability Zones, a high-availability solution for mission-critical applications, is generally available in UK South and in Japan East. Availability Zones are physically separate locations within an Azure region. Each Availability Zone consists of one or more datacenters equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. With the introduction of Availability Zones, Microsoft offers a service-level agreement (SLA) of 99.99% for uptime of virtual machines. Availability Zones are generally available in select regions.

Azure virtual network service endpoint policies expanded

Public preview for virtual network service endpoint policies for Azure Storage was expanded to four new US regions on March 25. Azure virtual network service endpoint policies enable you to prevent unauthorized access to Azure service resources from your virtual network. You can now allow access to only specific Azure service resources (for example, storage accounts) by using endpoint policies over service endpoints. For details about supported capabilities and limitations, and for configuration guidance, see Virtual network service endpoint policies (preview).