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
Virtual machine (VM) level disk bursting available on all Dsv3 and Esv3 families
Virtual machine level disk bursting allows your virtual machine to burst its disk IO and MiB/s throughput performance for a short time daily. This feature is now enabled on all our Dsv3-series and Esv3-series virtual machines, with more virtual machine types and families support soon to come. There is no additional cost associated with this new capability or adjustments on the VM pricing and it comes enabled by default.
Cloud Services (extended support) is generally available
Cloud Services (extended support), which is a new Azure Resource Manager (ARM)-based deployment model for Azure Cloud Services, is generally available. Cloud Services (extended support) has the primary benefit of providing regional resiliency along with feature parity with Azure Cloud Services deployed using Azure Service Manager (ASM). It also offers some ARM capabilities such as role-based access and control (RBAC), tags, policy, private link support, and use of deployment templates. The ASM-based deployment model for Cloud Services has been renamed Cloud Services (classic). Customers retain the ability to build and rapidly deploy web and cloud applications and services. Customers will be able to scale cloud services infrastructure based on current demand and ensure that the performance of applications can keep up while simultaneously reducing costs. The platform-supported tool for migrating existing cloud services to Cloud Services (extended support) also goes into preview. Migrating to ARM will allow customers to set up a robust infrastructure platform for their applications.
Storage
Azure File Sync agent v12
Improvements and issues that are fixed in the v12 release:
- New portal experience to configure network access policy and private endpoint connections
- You can now use the portal to disable access to the Storage Sync Service public endpoint and to approve, reject and remove private endpoint connections. To configure the network access policy and private endpoint connections, open the Storage Sync Service portal, go to the Settings section and click Network.
- Cloud Tiering support for volume cluster sizes larger than 64KiB
- Cloud Tiering now supports volume cluster sizes up to 2MiB on Server 2019. To learn more, see What is the minimum file size for a file to tier?.
- Measure bandwidth and latency to Azure File Sync service and storage account
- The Test-StorageSyncNetworkConnectivity cmdlet can now be used to measure latency and bandwidth to the Azure File Sync service and storage account. Latency to the Azure File Sync service and storage account is measured by default when running the cmdlet. Upload and download bandwidth to the storage account is measured when using the “-MeasureBandwidth” parameter. To learn more, see the release notes.
- Improved error messages in the portal when server endpoint creation fails
- We heard your feedback and have improved the error messages and guidance when server endpoint creation fails.
- Miscellaneous performance and reliability improvements
- Improved change detection performance to detect files that have changed in the Azure file share.
- Performance improvements for reconciliation sync sessions.
- Sync improvements to reduce ECS_E_SYNC_METADATA_KNOWLEDGE_SOFT_LIMIT_REACHED and ECS_E_SYNC_METADATA_KNOWLEDGE_LIMIT_REACHED errors.
- Files may fail to tier on Server 2019 if Data Deduplication is enabled on the volume.
- AFSDiag fails to compress files if a file is larger than 2GiB.
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.
More information about this release:
- This release is available for Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 installations.
- A restart is required for servers that have an existing Azure File Sync agent installation.
- The agent version for this release is 12.0.0.0.
- Installation instructions are documented in KB4568585.
Encryption scopes in Azure Storage
Encryption scopes introduce the option to provision multiple encryption keys in a storage account for blobs. Previously, customers using a single storage account for multi-tenancy scenarios were limited to using a single account-scoped encryption key for all the data in the account. With encryption scopes, you now can provision multiple encryption keys and choose to apply the encryption scope either at the container level (as the default scope for blobs in that container) or at the blob level.
Azure Data Explorer external tables
An external table is a schema entity that references data stored outside the Azure Data Explorer database. Azure Data Explorer Web UI can create external tables by taking sample files from a storage container and creating schema based on these samples. You can then analyze and query data in external tables without ingestion into Azure Data Explorer.
