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 Guest OS Family 6 (Windows Server 2019)
Azure Guest OS Family 6, based on Windows Server 2019, is now generally available. Windows Server 2019 is the operating system that bridges on-premises environments with Azure, adding layers of security while helping you modernize your applications and infrastructure.
Azure Availability Zones in East US 2
Azure Availability Zones, a high-availability solution for mission-critical applications, is generally available in East US 2.
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.
Update rollup for Azure File Sync Agent: January 2019
An update rollup for the Azure File Sync agent was released and addresses the following issues:
- Files are not tiered after upgrading the Azure File Sync agent to version 4.x.
- AfsUpdater.exe is now supported on Windows Server 2019.
- Miscellaneous reliability improvements for sync.
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 4.3.0.0.
- A restart may be required if files are in use during the update rollup installation.
- Installation instructions are documented in KB4481059.
Azure Migrate is available in Asia and Europe
Azure Migrate now supports Asia and Europe as migration project locations. This means that you can now store your discovered metadata in Asia (Southeast Asia) and Europe (North Europe/West Europe) regions.
In addition to Asia and Europe, Azure Migrate also supports storing the metadata in United States and Azure Government geographies. Support for other Azure geographies is planned for the future.
Note that the project geography does not restrict you from planning your migration for a different target location. Azure Migrate supports more than 30 regions as assessment target locations. The project geography is only used to store the discovered VM metadata.
M-series virtual machines (VMs) are available in Australia Central region
Azure M-series VMs are available in the Australia Central region. M-series VMs offer configurations with memory from 192 GB to 3.8 TiB (4 TB) RAM and are certified for SAP HANA.
