Category Archives: Datacenter Management

Azure by your side: new solutions for Windows Server 2012/R2 end of support

In the era of Artificial Intelligence and native services for the cloud, organizations continue to rely on Windows Server as a secure and reliable platform for their mission-critical workloads. However, it is important to note that support for Windows Server 2012/R2 will end on 10 October 2023. After that date, Windows Server 2012/R2 systems will become vulnerable if action is not taken, as they will no longer receive regular security updates. Recently, Microsoft has announced that Azure offers new solutions to better manage the end of support of Windows Server 2012/R2. These solutions will be examined in detail in this article, after a brief summary to set the context.

The impact of end of support for Windows Server 2012 R2: what it means for companies?

Microsoft has announced the end of support for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2, fixed for 10 October 2023. This event represents a turning point for many organizations that rely on these servers to access applications and data. But what exactly does end of support mean (EOL) and what are the implications for companies?

Understanding end of support

Microsoft has a lifecycle policy that provides support for its products, including Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. End of support refers to when a product is no longer supported by Microsoft, which means no more security updates will be provided, patches or technical support.

Why companies should care

Without regular updates and patches, companies using Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 are exposed to security vulnerabilities, such as ransomware attacks and data breaches. Furthermore, using an unsupported product such as Windows Server 2012 or 2012 R2 can lead to non-compliance issues. Finally, outdated software can cause compatibility issues with newer applications and hardware, hampering efficiency and productivity.

An opportunity to review IT strategy

Companies should use the EOL event as an opportunity to review their IT strategy and determine the desired business goals for their technology. In this way, they can align the technology with their long-term goals, leveraging the latest cloud solutions and improving operational efficiency.

The strategies that can be adopted to deal with this situation, thus avoiding exposing your IT infrastructure to security issues, have already been addressed in the article: How the End of Support of Windows Server 2012 can be a great opportunity for CTOs.

About this, Microsoft has introduced two new options, provided through Azure, to help manage this situation:

updating servers with Azure Migrate;
distribution on Azure Arc-enabled servers of updates deriving from the ESU (Extended Security Updates).

The following paragraphs describe the characteristics of these new options.

Updating Windows servers in end of support phase (EOS) with Azure Migrate

Azure Migrate is a service offered by Microsoft Azure that allows you to assess and migrate on-premises resources, as virtual machines, applications and databases, towards the Azure cloud infrastructure. Recently, Azure Migrate has introduced support for in-place upgrades for Windows Server 2012 and later, when moving to Azure. This allows organizations to move their legacy applications and databases to a fully supported operating system, compatible and compliant as Windows Server 2016, 2019 or 2022.

Key benefits of Azure Migrate's OS update feature

Risk mitigation: Azure Migrate creates a replica of the original server in Azure, allowing the OS to be updated on the replica while the source server remains intact. In case of problems, customers can easily go back to the original operating system.

Compatibility Test: Azure Migrate provides the ability to perform a test migration in an isolated environment in Azure. This is especially useful for OS updates, allowing customers to evaluate the compatibility of their operating system and updated applications without impacting production. This way you can identify and fix any problems in advance.

Reduced effort and downtime: integrating OS updates with cloud migration, customers can significantly save time and effort. With only one additional data, the version of the target operating system, Azure Migrate takes care of the rest, simplifying the process. This integration further reduces downtime of the server and applications hosted on it, increasing efficiency.

No separate Windows licenses: with the Azure Migrate OS update, you do not need to purchase an operating system license separately to upgrade. That the customer uses Azure Hybrid Benefits (AHB) o PAYG, is covered when migrating to an Azure VM using Azure Migrate.

Large-scale server upgrade: Azure Migrate supports large-scale server OS upgrades, allowing customers to upgrade up to 500 server in parallel when migrating to Azure. Using the Azure portal, you will be able to select up to 10 VMs at a time to set up replicas. To replicate multiple VMs you can use the portal and add VMs to be replicated in multiple batches of 10 VMs, or use the Azure Migrate PowerShell interface to configure replication.

Supported OS versions

Azure Migrate can handle:

Windows Server 2012: supports upgrading to Windows Server 2016;
Windows Server 2012 R2: supports upgrading to Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019;
Windows Server 2016: supports upgrading to Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022;
Windows Server 2019: supports upgrading to Windows Server 2022.

Deployment of ESU-derived updates on Azure Arc-enabled servers

Azure Arc is a set of Microsoft solutions that help businesses manage, govern and protect assets in various environments, including on premise, edge e multi-cloud, extending the management capabilities of Azure to any infrastructure.

For organizations unable to modernize or migrate before Windows Server 2012/R2 end of support date, Microsoft has announced Extended Security Updates (ESU) enable Azure Arc. With Azure Arc, organizations will be able to purchase and distribute Extended Security Updates seamlessly (ESU) in on-premises or multicloud environments, direct from the Azure Portal.

To get Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server 2012/R2 and SQL Server 2012 enable Azure Arc, you need to follow the steps below:

Preparing the Azure Arc environment: first of all, you need an Azure environment and a working Azure Arc infrastructure. Azure Arc can be installed on any server running Windows Server 2012/R2 or SQL Server 2012, provided that the connectivity requirements are met.
Server registration in Azure Arc: once the Azure Arc environment is set up, you need to register your Windows servers or SQL Server systems in Azure Arc. This process allows systems to become managed resources in Azure, making them eligible for ESUs.
Purchase of ESUs: once the servers are registered in Azure Arc, ESUs can be purchased, for each server you want to protect, through Azure.
ESU activation: after the purchase of the ESUs, you need to activate them on the servers. This process involves installing a license key and downloading security updates from Windows Update or your local update distribution infrastructure.
Installing updates: finally, once the ESUs are activated, you can install security updates on servers. This process can be managed manually or by automating it through update management tools.

Note: ESUs only provide critical and important security updates, they do not include new features or performance improvements. Furthermore, ESUs are only available for a limited time after Microsoft's end of support. Therefore, we recommend that you consider migrating to newer versions of servers to have access to all features, in addition to security updates.

Conclusions

This year, Microsoft celebrates the 30th anniversary of Windows Server, a goal achieved thanks to relentless innovation and customer support. However, customers must commit to keeping their Windows Server systems up-to-date near the end of support. In particular, the end of support for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2 poses a significant risk to companies, but it also presents an opportunity to review and improve their IT strategy. Identifying desired business goals, engaging in strategic planning e, if necessary, using these new solutions offered by Azure, companies can ensure a smooth and successful transition, optimizing their IT infrastructure to achieve their long-term goals.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (July 2023 – Weeks: 27 and 28)

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

Latest generation burstable VMs – Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 (preview)

The Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 series virtual machines are the latest generation of Azure burstable general purpose VMs, providing a baseline level of CPU utilization and capable of expanding to higher CPU utilization as workload volume increases. This is ideal for many applications such as development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers, and code repositories. These new B series v2 virtual machines, compared to B series v1, offer up to >15% better price-performance, up to 5X higher network bandwidth with accelerated networking and 10X higher remote storage throughput.

Azure Dedicated Host – Resize (preview)

With Azure Dedicated Host’s new ‘resize’ feature, you can easily move your existing dedicated host to a new Azure Dedicated Host SKU (e.g., from Dsv3-Type1 to Dsv3-Type4). This new ‘resize’ feature minimizes the impact and effort involved in configuring VMs when you want to upgrade your underlying dedicated host system.

Networking

Azure’s cross-region Load Balancer is now generally available

Azure Load Balancer’s Global tier is a cloud-native global network load balancing solution. With cross-region Load Balancer, you can distribute traffic across multiple Azure regions with ultra-low latency and high performance. Azure cross-region Load Balancer provides customers a static globally anycast IP address. Through this global IP address, you can easily add or remove regional deployments without interruption.

ExpressRoute private peering support for BGP communities

ExpressRoute private peering now supports the use of custom Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) communities with virtual networks connected to your ExpressRoute circuits. Once you configure a custom BGP community for your virtual network, you can view the regional and custom community values on outbound traffic sent over ExpressRoute when originating from that virtual network. These values can be used when applying filters or specifying routing preferences for traffic sent to your on-premises from your Azure environment.

Azure Virtual Network encryption

With Virtual Network encryption, customers can enable encryption of traffic between Virtual Machines and Virtual Machines Scale Sets within the same virtual network and between regionally and globally peered virtual networks. This new feature enhances the existing encryption in transit capabilities in Azure.

Sensitive Data Protection for Application Gateway Web Application Firewall logs (preview)

Azure’s regional Web Application Firewall (WAF) running on Application Gateway now supports sensitive data protection through log scrubbing. When a request matches the criteria of a rule, and triggers a WAF action, that event is captured within the WAF logs. WAF logs are stored as plain text for debuggability, and any matching patterns with sensitive customer data like IP address, passwords, and other personally identifiable information could potentially end up in logs as plain text. To help safeguard this sensitive data, you can now create log scrubbing rules that replace the sensitive data with “******”.

Storage

Azure Managed Lustre now generally available

Azure Managed Lustre is a managed file system, designed specifically for HPC and AI workloads on a pay-as-you-go model. It delivers high-performance distributed parallel file system with hundreds of GBps storage bandwidth and solid-state disk latency. The system fully integrates with Azure services such as Azure HPC Compute, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Azure Machine Learning.

Key benefits include:

a customizable Lustre file system that can be deployed on demand in minutes;
the high throughput needed for computationally intensive workloads;
easy integration with other Azure services;
managed pay-as-you-go model that allows organizations to save costs on maintenance and infrastructure setup.

Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage is now available in more regions

Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage is now available in Switzerland North, Japan East, Korea Central, South Africa North, Sweden Central, Canada Central and Central US regions. This next-generation storage solution offers advanced general-purpose block storage with the best price performance, delivering sub-millisecond disk latencies for demanding IO-intensive workloads at a low cost. It is well-suited for a wide range of enterprise production workloads, including SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, MongoDB, big data analytics, gaming on virtual machines, and stateful containers.

Microsoft Azure and Nutanix: a strategic partnership for hybrid cloud

In the last few years, the adoption of cloud computing has grown exponentially, revolutionizing the way organizations manage their IT assets. One of the key concepts that has gained popularity is the “hybrid cloud”, an operating model that combines the best of public and private cloud services in a single flexible solution. To deliver new hybrid cloud solutions that combine application agility with unified management between private cloud and Azure, Microsoft has entered into a strategic partnership with Nutanix, leader in hyperconverged infrastructure. This article will explore the key details of this strategic partnership, illustrating how hybrid cloud solutions offered by Azure and Nutanix can help companies achieve their digital transformation goals, while ensuring security, reliability and efficiency, essential for success in the cloud era.

Recognizing the need to offer solutions that fit specific customer needs, Microsoft Azure was designed from the ground up with the goal of reducing cost and complexity, while improving reliability and efficiency. This vision has materialized into a comprehensive platform that offers choice and flexibility for your IT environment.

Figure 1 – Overview of the possibilities offered by Microsoft Azure in terms of infrastructure

Moving to the cloud is not always a smooth process and there are situations where existing on-premises platforms continue to play a vital role. Azure enables customers to adopt the cloud at their own pace, ensuring continuity in the use of already known local platforms. This opportunity has long been available for VMware and is now also available for Nutanix.

What are Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2)?

Nutanix Cloud Cluster (NC2) are bare metal instances that are physically located within public clouds, including Microsoft Azure and AWS. NC2 runs the core of the Nutanix HCI stack, which includes the following main components:

Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV): the Kernel-based Virtual Machine-based hypervisor (KVM) open source;
Nutanix Acropolis Operating System (AOS): the operating system that abstracts the Nutanix components to the end user, such as KVM, virsh, qemu, libvirt and iSCSI, and which manages the entire backend configuration;
Prism: the solution that provides administrators with centralized access to configure, easily monitor and manage Nutanix environments.

Figure 2 – Overview of Nutanix Cloud Cluster on Azure

The Nutanix cluster on Azure will consist of at least three nodes. SKUs available for NC2 on Azure, with core details, RAM, storage and network are available at this link.

The connection of the on-premise environment to Azure is supported both via Express Route, both via VPN Gateway.

An example of implementation of NC2 is shown, from a networking point of view, in Azure:

Figure 3 – Example implementation of NC2 in Azure

Main adoption scenarios

The adoption of the Nutanix solution in Azure can take place to address the following scenarios:

disaster recovery and business continuity;
need to expand your data center;
need to quickly and easily migrate your Nutanix workloads to Azure

Benefits of this solution

The main benefits that can be obtained by adopting this solution are reported.

Adopt a consistent hybrid deployment strategy: a consistent hybrid deployment strategy can be established, combining on-premises resources with Nutanix clusters in Azure. This allows you to operate in a homogeneous way and without diversity between the two environments.
Easy activation and scalability: with Azure, you have the ability to easily activate and scale applications and services without encountering particular limitations. Indeed, the global infrastructure of Azure provides the scalability and flexibility necessary to meet changing business needs.
Optimization of investments made: you can continue to leverage your investment in Nutanix tools and expertise.
Modernization through the potential of Azure: with Azure, it is possible to modernize the architecture through the integration with innovative and cutting-edge services. In fact,, once customers activate their Nutanix environment, can benefit from further integration with Azure, enabling application developers to access the full ecosystem of services offered by Azure.

Cost model

Customers must bear costs to purchase Nutanix software and must pay Microsoft for use of cloud resources. Nutanix software on clusters can be licensed in several ways:

BYO licenses (Bring Your Own): this type of license allows customers to use their own Nutanix licenses they already own or are purchasing. In this way, customers can port their on-premises licenses to NC2. It is important to note that the Nutanix AOS license must be of the Pro or Ultimate type, since the AOS Starter license cannot be used with NC2.
PAYG (Pay-As-You-Go): this licensing model provides hourly payments based on the number of cores used or SSD usage. Customers pay only for resources actually used during the time the cluster is active.
Cloud Commit: this model requires a minimum commitment from the customer for a specific period of time. Customers commit to using Nutanix resources on NC2 for a specific period and receive preferential rates based on that commitment.

Support options

Microsoft offers support for NC2 bare metal infrastructure on Azure. To request assistance, simply open a specific request directly from the Azure portal. Nutanix, instead, provides support for NC2 Nutanix software on Azure. This level of support is called Production Support for NC2.

Conclusions

Thanks to the collaboration between Microsoft and Nutanix, this solution offers customers who already have a Nutanix on-premises environment the possibility to take advantage of the same features also in the Microsoft public cloud, also allowing you to access the wide range of services offered by Azure. This solution makes it possible to adopt a consistent operating model, which can increase agility, the speed of deployment and resiliency of critical workloads.

Azure Stack HCI: IT infrastructure innovation that reduces environmental impact

The era of technological innovation has a duty to merge with environmental sustainability, and Microsoft Azure Stack HCI represents a significant step forward in this direction. In the fast-paced world of enterprise IT, organizations are constantly looking for solutions that not only offer excellent performance and innovation, but which also contribute to reducing the environmental impact of their IT infrastructures. Azure Stack HCI stands as a cutting-edge solution that combines technological excellence with a commitment to environmental sustainability. In this article, we will explore the positive environmental implications of adopting Azure Stack HCI.

Reduction of energy consumption

In a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), several hardware components are replaced by software, which combines the processing layers, storage and networking in a single solution. Azure Stack HCI is the Microsoft solution that allows you to create a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI), where computing resources, storage and networking are consolidated into a single platform. This eliminates the need for separate devices, such as appliance, storage fabric and SAN, leading to an overall reduction in energy consumption. Furthermore, Azure Stack HCI systems are purpose-built to operate efficiently, making the most of available resources. This elimination of separate devices and optimization of resources help reduce the amount of energy required to maintain and cool the infrastructure, thus contributing to the reduction of carbon emissions.

Figure 1 – "Three Tier" Infrastructure vs Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI)

Intelligent use of resources

Azure Stack HCI allows you to flexibly scale resources based on workload needs and allows you to extend its functionality with Microsoft Azure cloud services, including:

Azure Site Recovery to implement disaster recovery scenarios;
Azure Backup for offsite protection of your infrastructure;
Update Management which allows you to make an assessment of the missing updates and proceed with the corresponding deployment, for both Windows machines and Linux systems, regardless of their geographical location;
Azure Monitor which offers a centralized way to monitor and control what is happening at the application level, network and hyper-converged infrastructure, using advanced analytics based on artificial intelligence;
Defender for Cloud which guarantees monitoring and detection of security threats on workloads running in the Azure Stack HCI environment;
Cloud Witness to use Azure storage account as cluster quorum.

Furthermore, there is the possibility of modernizing and making the file server more efficient as well, which remains a strategic and widely used component in data centers, by adopting the solution Azure File Sync. This solution allows you to centralize the network folders of the infrastructure in Azure Files, while ensuring flexibility, the performance and compatibility of a traditional Windows file server. Although it is possible to maintain a complete copy of the data in an on-premises environment, Azure File Sync turns Windows Server into a “cache” which allows quick access to the contents present in a specific Azure file share: then, all files reside in the cloud, while only the latest files are also kept in the on-premises file server. This approach allows you to significantly reduce the storage space required in your datacenter.

Figure 2 – Platform integration with cloud solutions

Thanks to virtualization, the dynamic allocation of resources and the adoption of solutions in the cloud environment, you can use only the resources you need on-premises, avoiding waste of energy. This approach to infrastructure reduces the environmental impact of manufacturing, management and disposal of obsolete hardware components.

Optimization of physical space

Consolidating resources into a single Azure Stack HCI platform reduces the need for physical space for server installation, storage devices and network devices. This results in a significant reduction in the surface area occupied in server rooms, allowing for more efficient space management and higher computational density. In turn, the reduction of the occupied space means lower cooling and lighting needs, thus contributing to overall energy savings.

Conclusions

The adoption of Microsoft Azure Stack HCI offers significant benefits in terms of environmental sustainability. The reduction of energy consumption, resource optimisation, the intelligent use of physical space and the wide flexibility help to reduce the environmental impact of data centers and IT infrastructures. Azure Stack HCI represents a step forward towards the adoption of more sustainable IT solutions, enabling organizations to optimize resources, reduce carbon emissions and promote more efficient and environmentally conscious management of IT resources.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (July 2023 – Weeks: 25 and 26)

Azure

Compute

Azure HBv4 and HX Series VMs for HPC

Azure HBv4 and HX-series Virtual Machines (VMs) are now generally available. With the general availability, Microsoft is offering customers the first VMs featuring the latest 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors with AMD 3D V-Cache™ technology (codename ‘Genoa-X’), paired with 400 Gigabit NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand. Azure HBv4 and HX-series VMs offer leadership levels of performance, scaling efficiency, and cost-effectiveness for a variety of HPC workloads such as computational fluid dynamics (CFD), financial services calculations, finite element analysis (FEA), geoscience simulations, weather simulation, rendering, quantum chemistry, and silicon design.

Networking

Azure Application Gateway: using a common port for public and private listeners (preview)

Azure Application Gateway now supports configuring the same port number for public and private listeners in preview. You no longer need to use non-standard ports or customize the backend application. This provision enables you to use a single Application Gateway deployment and easily configure it to serve traffic for both internet-facing and internal clients.

Default Rule Set 2.1 for Regional WAF with Application Gateway (preview)

Announcing the preview of the Default Rule Set 2.1 (DRS 2.1) for regional WAF on Azure Application Gateway. The default rule set is now available on the Azure Application Gateway WAF V2 SKU. DRS 2.1 is baselined off the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Core Rule Set (CRS) 3.3.2 and extended to include additional proprietary protections rules developed by Microsoft Threat Intelligence team. The Microsoft Threat Intel team analyzes Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) and adapts the CRS ruleset to address CVE and reduce false positives.

Storage

Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage in Southeast Asia, UK South, South Central US and West US 3

Azure Premium SSD v2 Disk Storage is now available in Southeast Asia, UK South, South Central US and West US 3 regions. This next-generation storage solution offers advanced general-purpose block storage with the best price performance, delivering sub-millisecond disk latencies for demanding IO-intensive workloads at a low cost. It is well-suited for a wide range of enterprise production workloads, including SQL Server, Oracle, MariaDB, SAP, Cassandra, MongoDB, big data analytics, gaming on virtual machines, and stateful containers.

Azure NetApp Files double encryption at-rest (preview)

Azure NetApp Files double encryption at-rest feature now provides multiple independent encryption layers, protecting against attacks to any single encryption layer. Threats are diminished to the encrypted data, for example:
– Single encryption key being compromised
– Encryption algorithms with implementation errors
– Data encryption configuration errors

This feature is currently available in West Europe, East US 2, East Asia regions and will roll out to other regions as the preview progresses.

Azure Elastic SAN Public Preview improvements

Azure Elastic SAN is currently in preview and several improvements have been made to the service. These include expanded regional availability, simplified multi-session connectivity for optimized volume performance, and native integration with Azure Container Storage (in preview). Azure Container Storage leverages Azure Elastic SAN as the backing storage resource to optimize price versus performance through dynamic resource sharing. Microsoft has also made it easier to migrate to Azure Elastic SAN and other block storage offerings like Premium SSD V2 and Ultra Disk, by including them in the Storage Migration Program.

Azure Management services: what's new in June 2023

In June, Microsoft announced a considerable number of news regarding Azure management services. Through these articles released monthly we want to provide an overall overview of the main news, in order to stay up to date on these arguments and have the necessary references for further information.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles:

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

AKS Network Observability add-on (preview)

The new AKS Network Observability add-on provides the ability to monitor the health of the network and connectivity of the AKS cluster. Integrating seamlessly with Azure-managed Prometheus and Azure-managed Grafana, this add-on provides better monitor capabilities in a unified experience.

These are the main features:

access to cluster-level network metrics, such as packet losses, connection statistics and more;
access to pod-level metrics and network debugging features;
support for all Azure CNIs;
support for all AKS node types: Linux and Windows;
ease of deployment using native Azure tools: AKS CLI, ARM models, PowerShell, etc.;
integration with Azure-managed Prometheus and Grafana offerings.

Azure Monitor Alert resources are now visible in the Azure portal

Historically, alert resources (alert rules, alert processing rules and action groups) have always been hidden resources in the Azure portal. This prevented them from appearing when searching or in the resource list and limited their viewing experience. Now Microsoft is making these resources “first-class citizens” in the Azure portal, so that they become visible in all places where the assets can be viewed in the portal, and more precisely the alerting resources:

appear in the search results in the top search bar of the Azure portal;
they appear when listing resources within a subscription or resource group;
they can now be viewed in a standard resource pane and will soon be editable as well (the same way you edit any other Azure resource).

Azure Monitor container insights for AKS cluster with ARM64 nodes

Container insights is a feature designed to monitor the performance of container workloads deployed in the cloud. Provides performance visibility by collecting processor and memory metrics from controllers, nodes and containers available in Kubernetes through the Metrics API. Azure Monitor container insights is now available for AKS clusters with ARM64 nodes.

Managed identity authentication in Azure Monitor Container Insights

Managed Identity is a secure and streamlined authentication model where the Azure Monitor monitoring agent uses the cluster's managed identity to send data to the Azure Monitor backend. This mechanism replaces the current certificate-based local authentication and eliminates the need to add a monitoring metrics publisher role to the cluster. Managed Identity will now be the default authentication mechanism for Container Insights.

Azure Virtual Desktop Insights powered by Azure Monitor agent (preview)

Administrators working with Azure Virtual Desktop Insights can now use the Azure Monitor Agent (AMA) to collect data from session hosts. This preview introduces the ability to use an updated workbook to help orchestrate configuration and management of all required components.

Govern

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toMicrosoft Cost Management

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Microsoft Cost Management, the solution to provide greater visibility into where costs are accumulating in the cloud, identify and prevent incorrect spending patterns and optimize costs . Inthis article some of the latest improvements and updates regarding this solution are reported.

Secure

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud

Microsoft Defender for Cloud development is constantly evolving and improvements are being made on an ongoing basis. To stay up to date on the latest developments, Microsoft updates this page, this provides information about new features, bug fixes and deprecated features. In particular, this month the main news concern:

simplified onboarding of multicloud accounts;
support for private endpoints in malware scanning in Defender for Storage;
updates to NIST standards 800-53 in compliance with regulations;
cloud migration planning with an Azure Migrate business case now includes Defender for Cloud;
express configuration for vulnerability assessments in Defender for SQL is available;
added more scopes to Azure DevOps connectors;
replacing agent-based detection with agentless detection for container capabilities in Defender CSPM.

Protect

Azure Backup

Multiple backups per day for Azure virtual machines

Azure Virtual Machine Backup allows you to create advanced policies to take multiple snapshots per day. This allows you to protect virtual machines with an RPO as low as four hours.

Migrate

Azure Migrate

New Azure Migrate releases and features

Azure Migrate is the service in Azure that includes a large portfolio of tools that you can use, through a guided experience, to address effectively the most common migration scenarios. To stay up-to-date on the latest developments in the solution, please consult this page, that provides information about new releases and features. In particular, this month the main news concern:

security cost savings with Microsoft Defender for Cloud (MDC), using the Azure Migrate business case;
troubleshooting issues affecting performance data collection and accuracy of Azure VM and Azure VMware Solution evaluation recommendations.

Azure Database Migration

Online migrations for Azure Database for MySQL instances

Azure Database Migration Service Online Migration for Azure Database for MySQL now allows you to migrate an Azure Database for MySQL instance – Single Server, a MySQL on-premises instance or MySQL servers in other clouds to Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server. This new feature helps minimize the downtime of critical applications and limit the impact on the availability of service levels.

Evaluation of Azure

To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (June 2023 – Weeks: 23 and 24)

Azure

Compute

Azure VMware Solution Stretched Clusters with Customer-Managed Keys

Stretched clusters for Azure VMware Solution (AVS) is now Generally Available, providing 99.99% uptime for mission critical applications that require the highest availability. With this release, customers can use Customer-Managed Keys to encrypt the stretched vSAN. By default, virtual machines within vSAN datastore are protected with data-at-rest encryption using FIPS 140-2 compliant Data Encryption Key (DEK) generated for each local disk on ESXi hosts. These DEKs are encrypted by VMware vSAN Key Encryption Key (service-managed key) provided by Microsoft.

Stretched Cluster Benefits:

improved application availability;
provide a zero-recovery point objective (RPO) capability for enterprise applications without needing to redesign them or deploy expensive disaster recovery solutions;
A private cloud with stretched clusters is designed to provide 99.99% availability due to its resilience to AZ failures.

Azure VMware Solution customer-managed encryption is supported through integration with Azure Key Vault. You can create your own encryption keys and store them in a Key Vault, or you can use Azure Key Vault API to generate encryption keys.

Mv2 Virtual Machine: 8TB memory

Mv2 High Memory virtual machines serve largest in-memory workloads providing infrastructure for 6 and 12TB memory needs. Based on customer demand, an 8TB memory virtual machine (VM) Standard_M416ms_8_v2 is now available, that offers an intermediate size to scale between 6TB and 12TB.

NGads V620-series VMs optimized for cloud gaming

NGads V620-series virtual machines (VMs), powered by AMD RadeonTM PRO V620 GPUs and AMD EPYCTM 7763 CPUs, are purpose-built for generating and streaming high quality graphics for an interactive gaming experience hosted on Azure. Featuring GPU partitioning with options for ¼, ½, or 1 full GPU, they allow customers to right-size their choice for the performance and cost of the business need. These VMs also feature the AMD Adrenaline Gaming Driver Cloud Edition that targets the same optimizations available in the consumer gaming version of the Adrenaline driver but is further optimized for the cloud environment.In addition, the NGads V620-series VMs also support graphics-accelerated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and visualization rendering, using the AMD Pro Workstation Driver, Cloud Edition.

Azure VMware Solution now available in North Switzerland

With the introduction of AV36 in North Switzerland, customers will receive access to 36 cores, 2.3 GHz clock speed, 576GB of RAM, and 15.36TB of SSD storage.

Confidential Virtual Machines (VM) support in Azure Virtual Desktop (preview)

Azure Confidential Virtual Machines (VMs) support in Azure Virtual Desktop is in public preview. Confidential Virtual Machines increase data privacy and security by protecting data in use. The Azure DCasv5 and ECasv5 confidential VM series provide a hardware-based Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) that features AMD SEV-SNP security capabilities, which harden guest protections to deny the hypervisor and other host management code access to VM memory and state, and that is designed to protect against operator access and encrypts data in use. With this preview, support for Windows 11 22H2 has been added to Confidential Virtual Machines.

Networking

Private Link support for Application Gateway

Private link configuration for Application Gateway enables incoming traffic to an Azure Application Gateway frontend and can be secured to clients running in another Azure Virtual Network, Azure subscription, or Azure subscription linked to a different Azure Active Directory tenant through Azure Private Link.

Azure Load Balancer per VM limit removal

The “Load balancer per VM” limit is now removed for customers using Standard Load Balancer. Previously this limit was 2 load balancers per VM (1 public and 1 internal). Now with this limit removed, you can associate as many load balancers per VM with either types (public or internal) up to the Azure Load Balancer’s limits.

Azure Load Balancer: inbound ICMPv6 pings and traceroute are now supported

Standard Public Load Balancer now supports inbound ICMP pings on IPv6 frontends as well as inbound tracerouting support to both IPv4 and IPv6 frontends. This is an addition to previous announcement of ICMPv4 pings support on Azure Load Balancer. Now, you can ping and traceroute to both IPv4 and IPv6 frontend of a Standard Public Load Balancer like you natively would on an on-premises device without any external software needed. This enables you to troubleshoot network issues, identify network bottlenecks, verify network paths, and monitor network performance between Azure Load Balancer and your client device. This functionality is generally available in all public regions, Azure China cloud regions, and Azure Government cloud regions.

Azure Front Door integration with managed identities

Azure Front Door now supports managed identities generated by Azure Active Directory to allow Front Door to easily and securely access other Azure AD-protected resources such as Azure Key Vault. This feature is in addition to the AAD Application access to Key Vault that is currently supported.

Azure Front Door upgrade from standard to premium

Azure Front Door supports upgrading from Standard to Premium tier without downtime. Azure Front Door Premium supports advanced security capabilities and has increased quota limits, such as managed Web Application Firewall rules and private connectivity to your origin using Private Link.

Azure Front Door Migration from classic to standard/premium

In March 2022, Microsoft announced the general availability of two new Azure Front Door tiers. Azure Front Door Standard and Premium are native, modern cloud content delivery network (CDN) catering to both dynamic and static content delivery acceleration with built-in turnkey security and a simple and predictable pricing model. The migration capability enables you to perform a zero-downtime migration from Azure Front Door (classic) to Azure Front Door Standard or Premium in just three simple steps or five simple steps if your Azure Front Door (classic) instance has custom domains with your own certificates. The migration will take a few minutes to complete depending on the complexity of your Azure Front Door (classic) instance, such as number of domains, backend pools, routes, and other configurations.

Azure Front Door Standard/Premium in Azure Government (preview)

Azure Front Door (AFD) Standard and Premium tier is now available in Azure Government in public preview, in the regions of Arizona and Texas. After this release, Local Government (US) customers and their partners can benefit from the new and enhanced capabilities on standard and premium. The new and enhanced capabilities include, but are not limited to, better reporting and diagnostic capabilities, expanded rules engine with server variables, enhanced Web Application Firewall (latest DRS rule set, Bot protection, Web Application Firewall Notebook using Sentinel for security investigation and monitoring, Microsoft Sentinel Analytics) and security capabilities (Private Link connectivity to your origin, subdomain takeover prevention) and many upcoming new features.

Storage

Zone Redundant Storage for Azure Disks is now available in more regions

Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) for Azure Disk Storage is now generally available on Azure Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs in Brazil South, UK South, East US, East US 2, and South-Central US regions. Disks with ZRS provide synchronous replication of data across three availability zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate zonal failures without causing disruptions to your application. This feature enables disks to tolerate zonal failures without causing disruptions to your application. Additionally, it allows you to maximize virtual machine availability without the need for application-level replication of data across zones. You can also use ZRS with shared disks to provide higher availability for clustered or distributed applications like SQL FCI, SAP ASCS/SCS, or GFS2.

Azure Files scalability improvement for Azure Virtual Desktop and other workloads that open root directory handles

Azure Files has increased the root directory handle limit per share from 2,000 to 10,000 for standard and premium file shares. This improvement benefits applications that keep an open handle on the root directory. For example, Azure Virtual Desktop with FSLogix profile containers now supports 10,000 active users per share.

Zone Redundant Storage for Azure Disks is now available in Japan East and Korea Central

Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) for Azure Disk Storage is now generally available on Azure Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs in Japan East and Korea Central regions.

Azure NetApp Files Availability zone volume placement enhancement: populate existing volume (preview)

Azure NetApp Files availability zone volume placement feature lets you deploy new volumes in the availability zone of your choice, in alignment with Azure compute and other services in the same zone. With this ‘Populate existing volume’ enhancement you can now obtain and, if desired, populate previously deployed, existing volumes with the logical availability zone information. It will automatically map the physical zone the volumes were deployed in and map it to the logical zone for your subscription. This feature will not move any volumes between zones. With this capability you can enhance workloads that were previously deployed regionally and align them with VMs in the same failure domain, for example to enable HA architectures across availability zones.

Azure AD Support for Azure Files SMB shares REST API (preview)

The public preview of Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) for Azure SMB Shares enables share-level read and write access for users, groups, and managed identities (MI) when accessing through the REST API. With Azure AD support, applications can now access Azure file shares securely, without storing or managing any credentials. Applications can leverage managed identities to securely access the customer-owned file shares. Azure Portal also now supports using Azure AD to authenticate requests to Azure Files. Users can choose Azure AD identity-based authentication method for the actions they take through portal such as browsing their file share contents.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (June 2023 – Weeks: 21 and 22)

Azure

Compute

Generation 2 VM for Windows

Generation 2 VMs support key features that aren’t supported in generation 1 VMs. These features include increased memory, Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), and virtualized persistent memory (vPMEM). You can now run Windows workloads on Generation 2 VMs in production to take advantage of these Generation 2 features.

Azure HX Virtual Machines for HPC

HX-series Virtual Machines (VMs) are optimized for large memory HPC workloads such as backend EDA, finite element analysis, computational geoscience, and big data analytics.

These VMs feature:

Up to 176 AMD EPYC™ 9004-series CPU cores with AMD 3D V-Cache (Genoa-X), 1.4 TB of RAM, clock frequencies up to 3.7 GHz, and no simultaneous multithreading.
Up to 1.4 TB/s of effective memory bandwidth and 2.3 GB L3 cache per VM, up to 12 GB/s (reads) and 7 GB/s (writes) of block device SSD performance.
400 Gb/s NDR InfiniBand from NVIDIA Networking to enable supercomputer-scale MPI workloads.

Storage

Azure Files geo-redundancy for standard large file shares (preview)

Azure Files geo-redundancy for large file shares is now in public preview for standard SMB file shares. Azure Files has supported large file shares for several years which not only provides file share capacity up to 100TiB but improved IO operations per second (IOPS) and throughput as well. Large file shares are widely adopted by customers using locally redundant storage (LRS) and zone-redundant storage (ZRS) but has not been available for geo-redundant storage (GRS) and geo-zone redundant storage (GZRS) until now. Geo-redundancy is critical for meeting various compliance and regulatory requirements. Geo-redundant storage asynchronously replicates to a secondary region and if the primary region becomes unavailable, you can initiate a failover to the secondary region.

New features in Azure Container Storage (preview)

Azure Container Storage, a unique storage service built natively for containers, is introducing several new features in preview to enhance the performance, reliability, and backup experience for its customers. Among the new features are volume snapshot, which allows you to capture the point-in-time state of persistent volumes, enabling you to back up data before applying changes. Additionally, the scalability target of Persistent Volumes has increased, empowering you to easily scale up your storage footprint. This means you can focus on building data services without worrying about the limitations of the underlying infrastructure.

Azure Management services: what's new in May 2023

To stay up to date on news regarding Azure Management services, this summary is released monthly, allowing you to have an overview of the main new features of the month. In this article you will find the announcements, summarized, accompanied by the necessary references to be able to carry out further investigations.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles:

Monitor

Azure Monitor

Azure Monitor for SAP solutions

Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions is now available. It is a solution for customers running SAP applications in a Microsoft Azure environment and allows end-to-end monitoring. With Azure Monitor for SAP, customers can centrally collect end-to-end telemetry data from SAP NetWeaver, database, Linux Pacemaker clusters in high availability and Linux operating systems. The solution Azure Monitor for SAP can be configured with no infrastructure to implement and maintain for customers. Some new features of Azure Monitor for SAP include SAP Landscape Monitor, which provides a single destination to understand the health of the entire SAP landscape, and SAP Insights (preview), which allows you to easily identify the root cause of SAP application availability or performance issues. Furthermore, Azure Monitor for SAP Solutions offers Transport Layer Security and new CPU performance alert templates, memory and disk I/O, plus many other features. With the release of this release, the version of Azure Monitor for SAP solutions (Classic) will be collected by 31 may.

Availability of the Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus

Prometheus, the open-source project of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, is considered the de-facto standard when it comes to monitoring containerized workloads. Running Prometheus in self-managed mode is often a great solution for smaller implementations, but scaling it to handle enterprise workloads can be a challenge.

Azure Monitor's fully managed service for Prometheus offers the best of what we like about the open-source ecosystem, while automating complex tasks such as scaling, high availability and long-term data retention. It is available as a standalone feature of Azure Monitor or as an integrated component of Container Insights, Azure Monitor Alerts and Azure Managed Grafana.

Azure Monitor Managed Service for Prometheus for Kubernetes enabled for Azure Arc (preview)

The Azure Monitor managed service for Prometheus extends support for monitoring Kubernetes clusters managed by Azure Arc. The Azure Arc-enabled Azure Monitor for Prometheus on Kubernetes managed service allows customers to monitor their Kubernetes clusters running anywhere and maintains the same functionality as monitoring Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

Azure Monitor Agent: support for CIS and SELinux hardening

The AMA has introduced support for hardening standards for CIS and SELinux. For SELinux, AMA works by activating a signed built-in policy. Through CIS, AMA supports select distros, also available on the Azure Marketplace.

Alert support for Azure Data Explorer (preview)

Azure Monitor alerts let you monitor Azure and application telemetry to quickly identify issues affecting various services. More specifically, Azure Monitor log alert rules allow you to set up periodic log telemetry queries to identify potential problems and receive notifications or trigger actions.

Until now, these alert rules supported querying Log Analytics and Application Insights data. Now Microsoft is introducing support for querying Azure Data Explorer tables as well (ADX) and to merge data between these data sources into a single query.

Cost optimization with transformations on Log Analytics for troubleshooting of Cosmos DB

Azure Cosmos DB now supports transformations on Log Analytics workspaces. To help reduce costs when you enable Log Analytics to troubleshoot Cosmos DB resources, transformations have been introduced. These transformations in the Log Analytics workspace allow you to filter columns, reduce the number of results returned and create new columns before the data is sent to the destination.

Configure

Azure Automation

Support for Python runbooks 3.8

Azure Automation has introduced support for Python runbooks 3.8. This feature allows you to create and run Python runbooks 3.8 for orchestrating the management tasks of hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Govern

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toMicrosoft Cost Management

Alert to optimize reservation purchases

Azure Reservations can provide cost savings by committing to annual or three-year plans. However, sometimes reservations can remain unused or underused, resulting in financial losses. As a user of a billing account or a reservation, it is possible to examine the percentage of use of the reservations purchased in the Azure portal, but important changes may be missed. Enabling alerts on the use of reservations, solves the problem by receiving email notifications whenever any of the reservations have low usage. This allows for timely intervention and optimization of reservation purchases to achieve maximum cost efficiency.

Secure

Microsoft Defender for Cloud

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Microsoft Defender for Cloud

new alerts in Defender for the Key Vault;
support encrypted disks in AWS for agentless scanning;
inclusion of new AWS Regions;
changes to identity recommendations;
new recommendations of Defender for DevOps to include Azure DevOps scan results;
release of the Vulnerability Assessment of containers based on Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management (MDVM) in Defender CSPM.

Protect

Azure Backup

Azure Backup Server V4

The V4 version of Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) has been released and introduces the following improvements:

Workload support: Azure Backup Server V4 supports installation on Windows Server 2022 using SQL Server 2022 come database MABS. Furthermore, adds support for backup of virtual machines running on Azure Stack HCI 22H2 and VMware 8.0, as well as Windows Server backup 2022 and SQL Server 2022.
Performance: Azure Backup Server V4 adds the ability to select and restore individual files/folders from online recovery points for Hyper-V and Azure Stack HCI virtual machines running Windows Server, without having to download the entire restore point. MABS V4 also adds support for parallel restores and features more parallel online backup jobs.
Security: with Azure Backup Server V4 you can use private endpoints to send backups to the Recovery Services vault.

Azure Backup Reports: support for more workloads

Azure Backup Reports now includes support for other workloads: Azure Database for PostgreSQL Servers, Azure Blobs and Azure Disks. Thanks to this update it is now possible to enable the logging of metadata related to the backup (such as job, backup item, policy, usage) for these workloads and retain these records for a customizable period of time depending on compliance and audit requirements. This way you can take advantage of the reporting views, already provided natively by the Backup Reports solution, to view information about protected items corresponding to these workloads.

Soft deletion of recovery points for Azure Backup (preview)

Azure Backup's soft delete feature now supports soft deletion of recovery points. This feature allows you to recover data from recovery points that may have been deleted as a result of backup policy changes. Soft deleting recovery points allows you to keep these recovery points for an additional duration, based on the retention specified for soft delete in the vault settings.

Support for confidential virtual machines using Customer Managed Keys (private preview)

Azure Backup is introducing support for backup of operating system disk encrypted confidential VMs, done using customer managed keys.

Azure Site Recovery

New Update Rollup

For Azure Site Recovery was released theUpdate Rollup 67 that solves several issues and introduces some improvements. The details and the procedure to follow for the installation can be found in the specific KB.

Migrate

Azure Migrate

New Azure Migrate releases and features

Azure Database Migration

Database Migration Service Pack for Oracle (preview)

The Database Migration Service Pack for Oracle is a collection of four extensions that provide a complete solution to modernize Oracle workloads and migrate them to databases in the Azure environment. This extension pack offers several benefits, including in-depth end-to-end assessments, correct sizing of Azure resources, code conversion, remediation planning and near real-time data migration in Azure environment (see next paragraph).

Data Migration for Oracle (preview)

The Data Migration for Oracle extension is a powerful tool that allows you to easily migrate Oracle databases to the Azure platform. This solution offers a seamless migration experience, from the source Oracle database to the target platform (SQL), using Azure Database Migration Service. The extension offers both offline and online data migration for critical databases, ensuring minimal downtime for the migration process.

Evaluation of Azure

To test for free and evaluate the services provided by Azure you can access this page.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (May 2023 – Weeks: 19 and 20)

Azure

Compute

Azure VMware Solution on Azure Government

Azure VMware Solution will become generally available on May 17, 2023, to US Federal and State and Local Government (US) customers and their partners, in the regions of Arizona and Virgina. With this release, Microsoft is combining world-class Azure infrastructure together with VMware technologies by offering Azure VMware Solutions on Azure Government, which is designed, built, and supported by Microsoft.

Networking

Routing Intent and Virtual WAN Integrated Firewall NVAs

Routing intent allows you to set up simple and declarative routing policies to configure Virtual WAN to route traffic to bump-in-the-wire security solutions such as Azure Firewall, Integrated Firewall NVA and SaaS deployed in the Virtual WAN hub. This feature delivers two critical use cases: inter-region/inter-hub traffic inspection and branch-to-branch (on-premises to on-premises traffic inspection). With the General Availability of routing intent feature, the Virtual WAN team also extended routing intent capabilities to Next Generation Firewall NVA’s integrated within the Virtual WAN hub. As a result, the Virtual WAN team is also announcing the General Availability of the first two integrated Firewall NVA’s in Virtual WAN: Check Point CloudGuard Network Security and Fortinet NGFW.

Seamlessly upgrade your Application Gateway V2 WAF configuration to a policy

Azure’s regional Web Application Firewall (WAF) on Application Gateway now supports a fully automated experience when upgrading your WAF from a configuration to a policy. WAF policies offer you multiple benefits over WAF configurations including:

richer feature set: Advanced features like newer managed rule sets, custom rules, per rule exclusions, bot protection rules, and more;
higher scale and performance with our next generation WAF engine;
simplified management experience: WAF policy allows you to define your WAF setup once, and share it across multiple gateways, listeners, and URL paths;
latest features: you can keep up to date with the latest features and enhancements.

Policy analytics for Azure Firewall

As application migration to the cloud accelerates, it’s common to update Azure Firewall configuration daily (sometimes hourly) to meet the growing application needs and respond to a changing threat landscape. Frequently, changes are managed by multiple administrators spread across geographies. Over time, the firewall configuration can grow sub optimally impacting firewall performance and security. It’s a challenging task for any IT team to optimize firewall rules without impacting applications and causing serious downtime. Policy analytics help address these challenges faced by IT teams by providing visibility into traffic flowing through the firewall with features such as firewall flow logs, rule to flow match, rule hit rate, and single rule analysis. IT admins can refine Azure Firewall rules in a few simple steps through the Azure portal.

Inbound ICMPv4 pings are now supported on Azure Load Balancer

Standard Public Load Balancer now supports inbound ICMP pings on IPv4 frontends. Previously, to determine reachability of a Load Balancer’s frontend, a TCP-based ping tool like Psping would need to be used. This added complexity as external software was needed on each client machine. Now, you can ping the IPv4 frontend of a Standard Public Load Balancer like you natively would on an on-premises device without any external software needed. This enables you to troubleshoot network traffic between Azure Load Balancer and your client device.

Azure Bastion now support shareable links

With the Azure Bastion shareable links feature, you can now connect to a target resource (virtual machine or virtual machine scale set) using Azure Bastion without accessing the Azure portal.
This feature will solve two key pain points:

administrators will no longer have to provide full access to their Azure accounts to one-time VM users—helping to maintain their privacy and security;
users without Azure subscriptions can seamlessly connect to VMs without exposing RDP/SSH ports to the public internet.

Now generally available, the shareable links feature is supported for peered VNETs across subscriptions and across regions. It is also supported for national clouds.

Azure DNS Private Resolver is available in additional regions

Azure DNS Private Resolver is now available in West US, Canada East, Qatar Central, UAE North, Australia Southeast, Norway East, Norway East, and Poland Central.

Always Serve for Azure Traffic Manager (preview)

Always Serve for Azure Traffic Manager (ATM) is now available in public preview. You can disable endpoint health checks from an ATM profile and always serve traffic to that given endpoint. You can also now choose to use 3rd party health check tools to determine endpoint health, and ATM native health checks can be disabled, allowing flexible health check setups.

Storage

Azure Container Storage (preview)

Azure Container Storage, now in preview, is a unique volume management service built natively for containers. It provides a consistent experience across different types of storage offerings, including Managed option (backed by Azure Elastic SAN), Azure Disks, and ephemeral disk on container services. This simplifies the deployment of persistent volumes and offers a highly scalable, cost-effective, high-performance and resilient storage solution. With Azure Container Storage, you can easily create and manage block storage volumes for production-scale stateful container applications and run them on Kubernetes, ensuring consistent experiences across different environments. The solution is optimized to enhance the performance of stateful workloads on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters by accelerating the deployment of stateful containers with persistent volumes and improving quality with reduced pod failover time through fast attach/detach. Additionally, by efficiently deploying and managing persistent volumes on backend storage options, you can reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with container storage.

Azure NetApp Files Standard Network Features – Edit Volumes (preview)

Standard Network Features provide you with an enhanced Virtual Networking experience for a seamless and consistent experience along with security posture for Azure NetApp Files. You are now able to edit existing ANF volumes and upgrading Basic network features to Standard network features.