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.
