This blog post series highlights the key announcements and major updates related to Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, as officially released by Microsoft in the past two weeks.

Azure

General

ItalyNorth – New Services Available

Microsoft has expanded the portfolio of services in the Italy North Azure Region, making it an even more robust destination for organizations seeking to leverage cloud technology for migration, modernization, and real-time analytics. Below are the key new services now available in the Italy North Azure Region.

• Azure VMware Solution (AV64) – The Azure VMware Solution (AV64) is now available in Italy North, allowing businesses to seamlessly migrate their existing VMware-based workloads to Azure. It provides a fully managed VMware environment in the cloud, designed to deliver scalability, security, and operational consistency without requiring businesses to rearchitect their applications. This solution empowers organizations to modernize their infrastructure while preserving the familiar VMware ecosystem.

• Oracle Database@Azure – Oracle Database@Azure is now available in the ItalyNorth Azure Region. This service operates on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) within Microsoft’s data centers, offering high-performance connectivity between Oracle Database and Azure resources. By colocating the services, customers benefit from reduced latency and faster access to their Azure applications. This collaboration enables organizations to take advantage of both Oracle’s and Microsoft’s leading cloud services, ensuring a seamless and efficient cloud experience.

• Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® on Confluent Cloud™ – Azure Native ISV Services now includes Apache Kafka® and Apache Flink® on Confluent Cloud™ in Italy North. These services provide powerful, scalable solutions for real-time event streaming and data processing pipelines. The native integration with Azure simplifies the architecture, enabling businesses to build real-time analytics solutions that are secure, scalable, and operationally efficient. This strengthens Italy North’s capabilities in supporting data-driven decisions and analytics.

• Azure Data Box – Azure Data Box is now available in the ItalyNorth Azure Region, offering businesses a secure and efficient solution to transfer large volumes of data to Azure. Ideal for companies facing bandwidth limitations or performing one-time large-scale data migrations, Azure Data Box simplifies the data transfer process while minimizing downtime. With its availability in ItalyNorth, businesses now have more options for managing their data migration efforts securely and effectively.

These additions mark a significant enhancement to the Italy North Azure Region, empowering organizations to innovate, migrate, and scale their cloud operations with greater efficiency.

Compute

Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based Virtual Machines

Microsoft has announced the general availability of the new Cobalt 100 Arm-based virtual machines (VMs). These VMs include the general-purpose Dpsv6-series and Dplsv6-series, as well as the memory-optimized Epsv6-series. The Cobalt 100 VMs deliver up to 50% better price-performance compared to the previous generation of Arm-based VMs, making them ideal for scale-out and cloud-native Linux-based workloads. These workloads include data analytics, web and application servers, open-source databases, and in-memory caches. Additionally, these VMs provide significant performance improvements: up to 1.4x better CPU performance, 1.5x improved performance on Java-based workloads, and up to 2x higher performance for web servers, .NET applications, and cache applications. They also feature 4x the local storage IOPS with NVMe and up to 1.5x better network bandwidth compared to earlier models.

ED25519 SSH Key Support for Linux VMs

Azure now supports ED25519 SSH keys for Linux VMs, offering a more secure and compact alternative to the traditional RSA keys. Previously, only RSA keys were available for secure SSH connections to Linux VMs on Azure. With this update, customers can now choose between RSA and ED25519 keys, allowing for more flexible and secure authentication options. The Azure Portal simplifies key management by enabling the creation of ED25519 keys directly. Additionally, Azure CLI and PowerShell support this key type, giving customers more ways to integrate ED25519 keys into their workflows. While RSA remains the default, the introduction of ED25519 enhances security and deployment efficiency for Linux VMs on Azure.

Networking

ExpressRoute Metro

ExpressRoute Metro is now generally available, offering a new private connectivity architecture designed to enhance network resiliency for Azure customers. ExpressRoute Metro provides dual-homed connections to two separate edge sites within the same city, ensuring improved redundancy and reliability. This feature is particularly valuable for maintaining uninterrupted service in the event of site-wide disruptions, ensuring business continuity for critical operations. Currently available in Amsterdam, Singapore, and Zurich, with upcoming launches in cities such as Atlanta, Milan, and Madrid, ExpressRoute Metro simplifies the setup process through a guided Azure portal, making configuration straightforward and user-friendly.

Custom IPv4 Prefixes (BYOIP) Can Be Used in Global/Regional Configuration

Microsoft has announced the availability of custom IPv4 prefixes using the bring-your-own-IP (BYOIP) feature in both global and regional configurations. This capability, now available in all public and US government regions, allows customers to bring public IPv4 ranges as small as /24 for global use across Azure. These ranges can be divided into regional subnets as small as /26, enabling users to associate smaller portions of the range with specific regions for redundancy and load balancing. This feature provides flexibility in IP address management, allowing for more efficient use of resources across multiple Azure regions while maintaining global availability.

Private Endpoint Support Without NVA Source Network Address Translation

Azure now offers private endpoint support without requiring source network address translation (SNAT) for traffic passing through a network virtual appliance (NVA). By configuring a specific tag on the NVA virtual machines, users can opt into this feature, which eliminates the need for SNAT for traffic destined for private endpoints. This enhancement simplifies the configuration process and ensures symmetric routing without affecting nonprivate endpoint traffic. Additionally, this feature supports internal compliance standards by maintaining traffic source information in logs. It is recommended to enable this feature during a maintenance window, as it may cause a one-time reset of long-running private endpoint connections traversing the NVA.

ExpressRoute Guided Configuration Experience

Microsoft has announced the general availability of the ExpressRoute guided configuration experience, designed to simplify the process of setting up multi-site resiliency circuits and connections. The guided experience focuses on making resiliency a key aspect of configuring ExpressRoute circuits and virtual network gateway connections. Customers can choose from three resiliency options: maximum, high, and standard. Maximum resiliency offers redundancy across and within peering locations, high resiliency provides redundancy across peering locations but not within, and standard resiliency focuses on redundancy within a single peering location. The experience also provides insights, such as the distance between peering locations and traffic engineering recommendations, to assist in informed decision-making. This guided configuration is available via the Azure portal, PowerShell scripts, and ARM templates, enhancing flexibility and ease of use for users when configuring ExpressRoute circuits.

Storage

Storage Account Default Egress Limit Increase to 200 Gbps

Microsoft has increased the default maximum egress limit for general-purpose v2 and Blob storage accounts from 120 Gbps to 200 Gbps across various regions. This increase applies to both new and existing storage accounts, allowing for greater data transfer capacity, especially for high-volume workloads. The enhanced limit ensures improved performance and scalability for customers relying on Azure storage services for data-intensive operations.

Azure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution

Azure Elastic SAN for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is now generally available. Azure Elastic SAN provides a fully managed, VMware Certified storage area network (SAN) for AVS customers, offering massive scalability, simplified management, and built-in redundancy at a low total cost of ownership (TCO). With Azure Elastic SAN, customers can scale their storage independently of performance requirements, enabling cost-effective expansion for use cases like backups and disaster recovery. Priced at $0.06-0.08 per GiB per month, this storage solution offers an economical yet robust option for AVS environments while delivering sufficient performance for a wide range of workloads.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack HCI

New Features for Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI

Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI has introduced a series of powerful features aimed at improving scalability, cost management, flexibility, and monitoring for IT administrators. These new capabilities are now generally available and offer a seamless experience through the Azure Virtual Desktop management interface. Below is an overview of the key updates and their benefits.

• Autoscale for Host Pools – The new Autoscale feature allows organizations to automatically scale session hosts up or down based on a predefined schedule, optimizing deployment costs. This feature, which was previously available for Azure Virtual Machines, can now be applied to Azure Stack HCI, enabling better resource management and cost savings.

• Start VM on Connect – This feature reduces operational costs by powering on session host VMs only when they are needed for active user connections and shutting them down when not in use. It allows organizations to maintain high efficiency by running virtual desktops only when required, thereby minimizing resource consumption.

• Windows 11 and Windows 10 Enterprise Single-Session Images from Azure Marketplace – IT administrators now have the ability to download and deploy Windows 11 and Windows 10 Enterprise single-session images from Azure Marketplace directly to their Azure Stack HCI clusters. This flexibility enables better customization of the virtual desktop environment to fit specific user requirements and workloads.

• Azure Virtual Desktop Insights Support – Azure Virtual Desktop Insights provides a centralized monitoring solution that allows IT admins to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues within their Azure Virtual Desktop environments. Now available for Azure Stack HCI, this tool enhances operational oversight by offering detailed performance metrics and troubleshooting capabilities.

• Per-User Access Pricing for Azure Virtual Desktop on Azure Stack HCI – Azure Virtual Desktop now supports a per-user access pricing model for Azure Stack HCI, enabling organizations and independent software vendors (ISVs) to provide external users with access to their virtual desktop solutions. This pricing flexibility allows businesses to offer cost-effective virtual desktop services tailored to their users’ needs.

Conclusion

Over the past two weeks, Microsoft has introduced a slew of updates and announcements pertaining to Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Azure Stack. These developments underscore the tech giant’s unwavering commitment to enhancing its cloud offerings and adapting to the ever-evolving needs of businesses and developers. Users of Azure can anticipate improved functionalities, streamlined services, and enriched features as a result of these changes. Stay tuned for more insights as I continue to monitor and report on Azure’s progression in the cloud sphere.

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