Category Archives: Microsoft Azure

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (November 2021 – Weeks: 43 and 44)

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.

In this dedicated post you can find the most important announcements and major updates officialized last week during Microsoft Ignite (November 2021) conference.

Azure

Compute

Zerto Disaster Recovery for Azure VMware Solution

Zerto Disaster Recovery is now available and supported with Azure VMware Solution, delivering data protection and disaster recovery services that eliminate data loss and downtime for vSphere virtual machines running on Azure VMware Solution environment.

Zerto Disaster Recovery for Azure VMware Solution supports the following 3 scenarios:

  • On-premises VMware to Azure VMware Solution for Hybrid disaster recovery
  • Azure VMware Solution to Azure VMware Solution for cloud-based disaster recovery
  • Azure VMware Solution to Azure IaaS for cloud-based disaster recovery

Azure Spot Virtual Machines: Try to restore functionality

You can now opt-in and use this feature while deploying Spot VMs using Virtual Machine Scale Sets. This new feature will automatically try to restore an evicted Spot VM to maintain the desired target compute capacity (e.g., number of VMs) in a scale set.

Storage

Azure File Sync agent v14

Improvements and issues that are fixed in the v14 release:

  • Improved server endpoint deprovisioning guidance in the portal. When removing a server endpoint via the portal, we now provide step by step guidance based on the reason behind deleting the server endpoint, so that you can avoid data loss and ensure your data is where it needs to be (server or Azure file share).
  • Invoke-AzStorageSyncChangeDetection cmdlet improvements. Microsoft has improved the Invoke-AzStorageSyncChangeDetection cmdlet and the 10,000 item limit no longer applies when scanning the entire share.
  • Azure File Sync is now supported in West US 3 region.
  • Reduced transactions when a file consistently fails to upload due to a per-item sync error.
  • Reliability and telemetry improvements for cloud tiering and sync.

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, Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server 2022 installations.
  • A restart is required for servers that have an existing Azure File Sync agent installation if the agent version is less than version 12.0.
  • The agent version for this release is 14.0.0.0.
  • Installation instructions are documented in KB5001872.

Ephemeral OS disks for Azure VMs support additional VM sizes

You now can choose where to store Ephemeral OS disks, either in VM temp disk or on VM cache. This feature enables Ephemeral OS disks to be created for all the VMs, which don’t have cache or have an insufficient cache (such as Dav3, Dav4, Eav4, and Eav3) but has sufficient temp disk to host the Ephemeral OS disk.

Networking

New Azure Firewall Premium capabilities

Several new Azure Firewall Premium capabilities are available:

  • Azure Firewall Premium availability in more regions. Azure Firewall Premium is now available in both Microsoft Government Cloud and Azure China 21Vianet. This expansion makes Azure Firewall Premium now available in 44 Azure regions.
  • Terraform support for Firewall Policy Premium. Azure Firewall Premium supports a range of DevOps tools including Azure CLI, PowerShell, REST API. Customers can now use Terraform, a popular open-source tool used by DevOps for implementing infrastructure as code, to manage their Azure Firewall Premium.
  • Web categories Category Check (in preview). Web categories lets administrators allow or deny user access to web site categories such as gambling websites, social media websites, and others. Often customers want to check what categories does a specific URL fall under. Customers can now use the convenience of Azure Portal to determine URL web categories and share feedback if the category is not accurate.

  • Migrate to Premium SKU using Stop/Start approach. If you use Azure Firewall Standard SKU with Firewall Policy, you can use the Allocate/Deallocate method to upgrade your Firewall SKU to Premium. This migration approach is supported on both VNET Hub and Secure Hub Firewalls. Secure Hub deployments will be upgraded while preserving the public IP of the firewall.

Extended regional availability for Private Link NSG Support and for Private Link UDR Support

Private Endpoint support for Network Security Groups (NSGs) and Private Endpoint support for User Defined Routes (UDRs) are now in public preview.

  • Private Endpoint support for Network Security Groups (NSGs) enhancement will provide you with the ability to enable advanced security controls on traffic destined to a private endpoint.
  • Private Endpoint support for User Defined Routes (UDRs) enhancement will provide you with the ability to apply custom routes to traffic destined to a private endpoint with a wider subnet range.

At this time, this features are available in the following regions: UsEast2Euap, UsCentralEuap, WestCentralUS, WestUS, WestUS2, EastUS, EastUS2, Asiaeast, Australiaeast, Japaneast, Canadacentral, Europenorth, Koreacentral, Brazilsouth, Uksouth, US South, US North, and France Central.

ExpressRoute IPv6 Support for Private Peering

IPv6 support for ExpressRoute Private Peering is now generally available with ExpressRoute circuits and Azure environments globally. IPv6 support will unlock hybrid connectivity for you as you look to expand into mobile and IoT markets with Azure, or to address IPv4 exhaustion in your on-premise networks.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: most impactful announcements at Microsoft Ignite – November 2021

This special edition includes the most important announcements and major updates regarding Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Azure Stack, officialized by Microsoft this week during Microsoft Ignite (November 2021) conference. Microsoft announced several important additions to its Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) portfolio and the Microsoft infrastructure services continue to evolve to optimize the experience of running business-critical workloads.

Azure

Compute

Azure trusted launch for Virtual Machines

Azure trusted launch protects your virtual machines against boot kits, rootkits, and kernel-level malware.  Trusted launch allows administrators to deploy virtual machines with verified and signed bootloaders, OS kernels, and drivers. By leveraging secure and measured boot, administrators gain insights and confidence of the entire boot chain’s integrity. With virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM), administrators can securely protect keys, certificates, and secrets in the virtual machines. In addition, administrators can monitor and attest to the integrity of virtual machines as well as reacting to any changes to the attestation policy baseline. Azure Security Center serves as a single pane of glass for integrity alerts, recommendations, and remediations generated by trusted launch. These new features are easily enabled , trusted launch is switched on with a simple change in deployment code or a checkbox within the Azure portal for all virtual machines.

Expansion of the Azure Virtual Machines portfolio

New Azure Virtual Machines, which provide better price-performance for most general-purpose and memory-intensive workloads compared to prior VM generations, are now generally available. This important expansion of the Azure Virtual Machines portfolio now includes:

  • The general availability of Dv5 and Ev5 Azure VMs, which deliver up to 15% increased performance for many workloads and better price-performance than the previous Dv4 and Ev4-series VMs. These new VMs can scale up to 96 vCPUs and feature the latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor in a hyper-threaded configuration.
  • The new Dasv5 and Easv5 Azure VMs are based on the 3rd Generation AMD EPYCTM 7763v (Milan) processor. These new VMs provide options with and without local disk storage for a lower price of entry. Standard SSDs, Standard HDDs, Premium SSDs, and Ultra Disk storage are supported based on regional availability. In addition, support for nested virtualization is also available.
  • The  new DCsv3 and DCdsv3-series Azure Virtual Machines transform the state-of-the-art for confidential workloads. Now with the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors, the capabilities of DC-series have improved substantially.

The Dv5 and Dasv5 Azure VMs, work well for many general computing workloads, e-commerce systems, web front ends, desktop virtualization solutions, customer relationship management applications, entry-level and mid-range databases, application servers, and more. The Ev5 and Easv5 Azure VMs are ideal for memory-intensive enterprise applications, larger relational database servers, data warehousing workloads, business intelligence applications, in-memory analytics workloads, and additional business-critical applications. 

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets: new orchestration mode

Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode helps you simplify the deployment, management, and scalability of your applications. These new features also combine the functionality of our previously separate Availability Sets and Virtual Machine Scale Sets offerings. As a result, you will now be able to manage your business-critical applications more effectively while ensuring high availability at massive scale. Additionally, this new capability provides full control of the individual VMs within a scale set while increasing overall performance. IT organizations will now also be able to change VM sizes without redeploying their scale set resulting in greater operational agility. They will also be able to mix Spot Virtual Machines and pay-as-you-go VMs within the same scale set to optimize costs while managing VMs and VM scale sets using the same APIs.

Azure VMware Solution now generally available in the Germany West Central Azure region

Azure VMware Solution has now expanded availability to Germany West Central, this update is in addition to the existing availability multiple Azure regions in US, Europe, Australia, Japan, UK, Canada, Brazil and Southeast Asia (Singapore).

Storage

Centralized management of keys for encrypting Azure disks

Now you can manage your Azure Key Vault centrally in a single subscription and use the keys stored in the Key Vault to encrypt managed disks and snapshots in other subscriptions in your organization. This allows your security team to enforce and easily manage a robust security policy to a single subscription.

On-demand disk bursting for Azure Premium SSDs

Microsoft is announcing the general availability of on-demand bursting on Azure Premium SSDs larger than 512 GiB or larger. Unlike the previous credit-based system where you can only burst if you have accumulated credits, the new on-demand bursting capability allows you to burst up to 6X (up to 30,000 IOPS and 1,000 MB/s of throughput) of the provisioned amount whenever needed. This provides you with the flexibility to scale performance to meet demand and optimize costs. You can easily take advantage of on-demand bursting by enabling it on supported Premium SSD disks. You will pay for a burst enablement fee and burst transaction costs for the additional transactions beyond the provisioned target.

Live resize of Azure Disk Storage (preview)

Resizing a disk on Azure can provide more storage capacity and better performance for your applications. Now, with live resize in preview, you can dynamically increase the size of your disks without any downtime to your application. You can start with smaller disks to keep costs down and increase the size of your disks without any downtime as your data footprint grows.

Cross-region snapshot copy for Azure Disk Storage (preview)

Incremental snapshots are cost-effective point-in-time backups of Azure Managed Disks. They are billed for the changes to disks since the last snapshot and are always stored on the most cost-effective storage, Standard HDD storage, irrespective of the storage type of the parent disk. With cross-region snapshot copy now in preview, you can easily copy of incremental snapshots to any region of your choice. Azure manages the copy process and ensures that only changes since the last snapshot in the target region are copied over, reducing the data footprint and recovery point objective (RPO).

Azure VMware Solution: new capabilities introduced for disk pool (preview)

New capabilities are introduced in Disk Pool (preview) to enable Disk storage as the persistent storage for Azure VMware Solution. Disk Storage integration with Azure VMware Solution combines the power of familiar VMware technology running on Azure, with efficient Azure Disk Storage. Disk Pool enables Azure VMware Solution to access Disk storage by surfacing an Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) endpoint for disks. You can add new or existing disks to disk pool and expose them as datastores in Azure VMware Solution. Microsoft is introducing new capabilities to disk pool across availability, cost-effectiveness, and end-to-end integration:

  • Improved availability of disk pool with an enhancement to the underlying iSCSI infrastructure to a Highly Availably architecture with dual controller support
  • Addition of Azure Standard SSDs as a supported disk offering for a more cost-effective option for Disaster Recovery scenarios
  • Updates to the pricing model to a service-based pricing model. Currently, customers are being billed for the managed resources deployed to support disk pool. With this new pricing model, customers will be charged an hourly service fee, which is based on the performance tier selected (Basic, Standard, Premium SKUs). The pricing model change will be effective on December 1, 2021.
  • End-to-end portal experience for connecting a disk pool to Azure VMware Solution clusters and managing underlying storage

Networking

Bastion Standard SKU

With the new Azure Bastion Standard SKU, you can now perform/configure the following: 

  • Manually scale Bastion host Virtual Machine instances: Azure Bastion supports manual scaling of the Virtual Machine (VM) instances facilitating Bastion connectivity. You can configure 2-50 instances to manage the number of concurrent SSH and RDP sessions Azure Bastion can support. 

  • Azure Bastion admin panel: Azure Bastion supports enabling/disabling features accessed by the Bastion host.

Azure Virtual Network Manager (preview)

Azure Virtual Network Manager is a highly scalable and available network management solution. It allows you to simplify network management across subscriptions globally. Using the centralized network management capabilities, you can manage your network resources at scale from a single plane of glass.

Key features of Azure Virtual Network Manager include:

  • Global management of virtual network resources across regions and subscriptions
  • Automated management and deployment of virtual network topologies such as hub and spoke and mesh
  • High-priority security rule enforcement at scale to protect your network resources
  • Simple deployment of network configurations

Gateway Load Balancer (preview)

Gateway Load Balancer is a fully managed service enabling you to deploy, scale, and enhance the availability of third party network virtual appliances (NVAs) in Azure. You can add your favorite third party appliance whether it is a firewall, inline DDoS appliance, deep packet inspection system, or even your own custom appliance into the network path transparently, all with a single click.

With Gateway Load Balancer, you can easily add or remove advanced network functionality without additional management overhead. It provides the bump-in-the-wire technology you need to ensure all traffic to a public endpoint is sent to the appliance before your application. What makes Gateway LB even more powerful is ensuring symmetrical flows or ensuring a consistent route to your network virtual appliance, without having to update routes manually. As a result, packets traverse the same network path in both directions to function are able to do so.

NAT gateway integration with AKS

You can now provision a NAT gateway as part of cluster creation or create an AKS cluster with a NAT gateway on an existing VNET, instead of configuring a NAT gateway manually. A NAT gateway is a Network Address Translation (NAT) service. You can use a NAT gateway so that instances in a private subnet can connect to external services, but external services cannot initiate a connection. With NAT gateway support, ingress traffic can be handled via the Load Balancer, and egress traffic can be distributed across up to 16 IP addresses, providing the potential for 64,000 concurrent UDP and TCP flows per IP.

New troubleshooting experiences in Network Insights for VPN Gateway & Azure Firewall

Access rich insights and new troubleshooting experiences in Azure Monitor Network Insights for VPN Gateway and Azure Firewall.

With the new resources, you can access:

  • A resource topology showing resource health and connected resources
  • A pre-built workbook showing all key metrics along multiple
  • Direct links to documentation and troubleshooting help

ExpressRoute private peering support for BGP communities and FastPath improvements (preview)

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.

Also, ExpressRoute FastPath now supports a greater variety of scenarios, such as support for traffic sent to peered virtual networks.

Azure Network Function Manager

Azure Network Function Manager, which offers a consistent management experience for pre-validated mobile network functions to enable a private LTE/5G solution, is now generally available. The service also enables a seamless cloud-to-edge experience for Azure Marketplace network functions like SD-WAN and VPN. For a true hybrid experience, customers can use Azure Marketplace to choose from a pre-validated list of marketplace network functions to help ensure proper operation with Azure Stack Edge.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack HCI

Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI (preview)

With Azure Virtual Desktop for Azure Stack HCI, you can maintain full control over your infrastructure and enjoy the advantages of Azure Virtual Desktop in your own datacenter, including a full Windows 10 and 11 desktop experience for users with multi-session or single session support to optimize cost and performance.

Azure benefits for Windows Server

To license and activate Windows Server, Azure Stack HCI already lets you bring your own Datacenter license to enable automatic VM activation (AVMA). Coming soon, if you don’t already have a license, there’s a convenient new option to pay for your Windows Server guests through your Azure subscription, just like in Azure.

Arc-enabled VM management (preview)

In addition to managing your host cluster, you can now use Azure Arc to provision and manage virtual machines running on Azure Stack HCI directly from the Azure Portal. VMs and their associated resources like VM images, disks, and networks are projected into ARM as separate first-class resources by a new cross-platform technology called the Arc resource bridge.

Azure Management services: what's new in October 2021

In October, Microsoft announced a considerable number of news regarding Azure management services. Through these articles released on a monthly basis I want to provide an overall overview of the main news of the month, so that you can always stay up to date on these topics and have the necessary references to carry out further studies.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

Availability and support of availability zones in new regions

Azure Monitor Log Analytics is available in the following new regions:

  • West US 3
  • Korea South
  • Canada East 

To check the availability of the service in all the Azure regions you can consult this document.

Furthermore, support for Availability Zones was introduced in the region of West US 2 for Azure Monitor Log Analytics and Application Insights, which allows to ensure greater availability for the logs present in the Workspace.

Azure Monitor container insights: updating the user experience from the portal

The user experience from the portal for Azure Monitor container insights has been updated and allows you to:

  • Get detailed information about containers more easily
  • View resource usage as allocable capacity
  • Take advantage of new metrics and new recommended alerts

Azure Monitor Query SDK

Microsoft has released the Azure Monitor Query SDK for .NET, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript e Python. This new SDK allows developers to build applications that perform read-only queries on Azure Monitor logs and metrics, so that they can analyze and visualize the data in customized ways. The SDK has been modernized to follow the Azure SDK guidelines and be idiomatic for each programming language. Furthermore, introduces a number of updates and new features.

Azure Monitor application insights in Azure Spring Cloud

Thanks to this new integration in Azure Monitor Application Insights it is possible to enable the monitoring of Java Spring Boot applications running in Azure Spring Cloud with a few simple steps and without making any changes to the code.

Govern

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, 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, including:

Secure

Azure Security Center

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center 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:

Protect

Azure Backup

Multiple backups during the day for Azure Files

Keeping RPO low is often a key requirement for Azure Files that contain frequently updated business-critical data. To ensure minimal data loss, in the event of an emergency or unwanted content changes, organizations may need to back up more frequently than once a day. Azure Backup now allows you to create backup policies to take multiple snapshots per day. With this feature it is also possible to define the duration of the backup processes.

Support for Archive storage for the backup of VMs and SQL on board VMs using the Azure portal

Azure Backup announced in August the ability to move recovery points to the Azure Storage Vault-Archive tier to save costs and retain backup data for a longer duration. This feature is available for Azure VMs and SQL Servers installed on board Azure VMs. Initially this possibility was only given using Azure PowerShell, while now it is possible to move these backups from the standard tier to the new archive tier also from the Azure portal.

When moving backup data from vault-standard to vault-archive, Azure Backup converts incremental data into full backup. This procedure involves an increase in the total GB used, but costs are reduced due to the huge difference in cost per GB between the two storage tiers. To simplify this process, Azure Backup provides advice on Recovery Points (RPs) for which migration to the vault-archive is recommended. Restores can always be done in an integrated way from the Azure portal, with a simple and intuitive process.

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 changes concern support for new geographical areas.

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 (October 2021 – Weeks: 41 and 42)

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

New centralized management experience for Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server (preview)

Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server helps reduce costs by allowing existing on-premises licenses with active Software Assurance to be assigned to Azure. Now there’s an easier way to manage the benefit, optimize cost savings, and sustain compliance for the entire organization. Instead of assigning the benefit to each individual Azure resource (e.g. virtual machine), billing admins can now assign and manage SQL Server licenses at an Azure subscription or entire Azure account level.

Cross region replication for Azure NetApp Files

With this disaster recovery capability, you can replicate your Azure NetApp Files volumes between select Azure standard and non-standard region pairs continuously in a fast and cost-effective way, protecting your data from unforeseeable regional failures. Azure NetApp Files cross region replication leverages NetApp SnapMirror technology so only changed blocks are sent over the network in a compressed, efficient format. This technology reduces the amount of data required to replicate across the regions with up to 50% or more, therefore saving Azure NetApp Files customers data transfer cost. It also shortens the replication time so you can achieve a smaller Restore Point Objective.

Networking

Azure Firewall Premium now generally available in five new Azure regions

Azure Firewall Premium provides next generation firewall capabilities that are required for highly sensitive and regulated environments, and it is now generally available in the following new Azure Cloud regions: USGov Texas, USGov Arizona, USGov Virginia, China North 2 and China East 2.

Azure Stack

Azure Stack HCI

New feature update

Feature updates for Azure Stack HCI are released periodically to enhance the customer experience. This month’s feature update for Clusters running Azure Stack HCI, version 21H2 are:

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (October 2021 – Weeks: 39 and 40)

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

What’s new in Azure VMware Solution

  • Azure VMware Landing Zone is now publically available. It is Microsoft’s prescriptive, opinionated and best-practices backed guidance for deploying and managing workloads running on Azure VMware solution.
  • It’s soon possible to use Azure NetApp Filesas NFS datastore for Azure VMware Solution. It’s a great option for using the same NetApp VSAN datastores as used in on-premise environments in Azure now.
  • It is possible now to do HCX migration over VPN and SD-SWAN. Customers can get an additional option besides Azure ExpressRoute for driving migrations.  
  • Azure VMware Solution is now included as part of Azure Workload Acquisition & Nurture incentive Partners can take advantage of multiple benefits available under the program to drive Azure VMware Solution projects.
  • New enhancements, global expansion, partner integration are now available as documented here.

Availability Zones now generally available in new regions

Azure Availability Zones are now generally available in the South Africa North, Norway East and Korea Central region. These new zones provide customers with options for additional resiliency and tolerance to infrastructure impact.

Storage

Azure NetApp Files waitlist removal

Azure NetApp Files, one of the fastest growing bare-metal Azure services is now available to Azure customers directly from the Azure portal, CLI, API or with SDK, without having to go through waitlist approval process.

Standard network features for Azure NetApp Files (preview)

Standard network features for Azure NetApp Files volumes is now in public preview in select regions. This includes support for increased IP limits, Network Security Groups, User-defined routes, and additional connectivity patterns like connectivity over Active/Active VPN gateway and ExpressRoute FastPath.

Azure NetApp Files Backup capability (preview)

Azure NetApp Files backup expands the data protection capabilities of Azure NetApp Files by providing fully managed backup solution for long-term recovery, archive, and compliance.
Azure NetApp Files online snapshots are now enhanced with backup of snapshots. With this new backup capability, you can offload your Azure NetApp Files snapshots to Azure blob storage in a fast and cost-effective way, further protecting your data from accidental deletion.

Enable hierarchical namespace for existing Azure Storage accounts

Accelerating value through data analytics by enabling the Azure Data Lake Storage (ADLS) hierarchical namespace for existing Azure Storage accounts is now generally available. The benefits of the ADLS hierarchical namespace in providing enhanced performance and features that are dedicated to maximizing the value of data analytics is well established. You can now get this benefit for existing accounts and data by enabling the hierarchical namespace in place.

Object replication for Premium Block Blob Storage (preview)

Object replication allows you to replicate your premium block blob data at the blob level from one storage account to another anywhere in the Azure.
Object replication unblocks a new set of common replication scenarios for premium block blobs:

  • Minimize latency: have your users consume the data locally rather than issuing cross-region read requests.
  • Increase efficiency: have your compute clusters process the same set of objects locally in different regions.
  • Optimize data distribution: have your data consolidated in a single location for processing/analytics and then distribute only resulting dashboards to your offices worldwide.

Azure China: the aspects to know for a successful choice

For European and US companies with part of their business in China, the adoption of cloud solutions is becoming increasingly attractive. Microsoft offers the possibility of adopting Azure solutions also in China and a large number of important companies of the caliber of Coca Cola, BMW and Heineken have already landed on the Azure platform in China. However, there are important aspects and some peculiarities, covered in this article, which is good to take into consideration to make an informed choice when you intend to proceed with the deployment of line of business applications in the areas from China to Azure.

What is Azure China?

To offer cloud services in China and ensure consistent quality of service globally, you have the option to adopt Azure China, which has the following characteristics:

  • It is independently managed and sold by 21Vianet in mainland China. Shanghai Blue Cloud Technology Co., Ltd. (“21Vianet”) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Beijing 21Vianet Broadband Data Center Co., Ltd.
  • This is a physically separate instance of cloud services located in China.
  • Compared to Microsoft-managed Azure Public Areas, Azure subscriptions from Chinese regions can only be created by a Chinese entity. This means that to activate Azure services in these geographic areas it is necessary to collaborate with a local organization in mainland China. In fact,, during the registration process, you are asked to specify a telephone number and an address in China. After creating the account, subscription management is the same as for any other Azure region, using a dedicated Azure portal.

To allow customers and partners to examine all important aspects, before activating workloads in Azure China, Microsoft has published this list of activities.

Datacenter

Azure China datacenters are located in eastern and northern China and are geographically separated by more 1.000 kilometres. Also for these datacenters there is support for geographic replication and business continuity, allowing to obtain high data reliability for Azure services. The following regions are currently available on the Chinese territory: China North, China North 2, China East e China East 2.

New Azure region coming to China in 2022

To meet the growing public cloud service needs of the Chinese market, Microsoft announced that in the 2022 a new Azure region will be available in North China, always managed by its local operating partner 21Vianet. This expansion is expected to double the capacity of Microsoft's cloud portfolio in China in the coming years, which in addition to Azure includes Microsoft Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform. All of this will help fuel further innovation and digital transformation for developers, partner, and customers in China and around the world.

Availability of services

There is a gap between the services that can be activated in Azure China and the global services of Azure. Taking this into account, you can check the services available in the regions of China in this page. Furthermore, releases of new services, Azure versions and new features have their own history in China.

Connectivity and access to resources

First of all, It is good to specify that the workloads distributed in Azure China are potentially accessible anywhere globally.

However, please note that Azure Global Regions and Azure Chinese Regions are physically disconnected. Therefore, to privately connect the resources located in the subscriptions in Azure China with those in the global areas of Azure, it is necessary to provide the activation of VPN site-to- site or ExpressRoute.

The adoption of a hybrid architecture allows you to extend applications and workloads located in Azure China and provide connectivity and interoperability globally.

The following connections are supported:

  • VPN or Azure ExpressRoute to create a direct network connection between Azure China and the on-premises environment located in China.
  • Site-to-site VPN to connect an Azure site in China to the on-premises environment outside China. ExpressRoute is not supported for direct network connectivity to an external site outside of China (Azure global is also considered external).

Figure 1 – Cross-border connectivity

In this regard, it is necessary to consider that the purchase of the connectivity service must be done by contacting qualified telecommunications operators who have a license issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT).

Free ExpressRoute circuit for China

Azure China ExpressRoute offers a free circuit among the following paired regions: China North (N1) – China North 2 (N2) e China East (E1) – China East 2 (E2). This allows for minimal network latency, similar to being within the same region. The ExpressRoute crossover N1-E2, E1-N2 requires ExpressRoute Premium and is subject to a cross-data transfer charge.

Network latency

Between China and the rest of the world, high network latencies, low bandwidth, unstable connections and high costs are situations that occur in most cases.

All of this happens because of the intermediary technologies that regulate internet traffic that crosses the border. Among these the “Great Firewall of China” which protects Chinese Internet access and filters traffic to China. In fact,, almost all traffic going from the Republic of China outside of China, with the exception of special administration areas such as Hong Kong and Macao, go through the Great Firewall. Traffic passing through Hong Kong and Macao does not fully hit the Great Firewall, but it is managed by a subset of the Great Firewall.

Figure 2 - Interconnections with China

To improve interconnections with China, it is also possible to use the Azure Virtual WAN service, as detailed in this Microsoft documentation.

Figure 3 - Example of architecture with Azure Virtual WAN

Furthermore, to improve the performance and responsiveness of websites with streaming media and other rich media content, it is possible to evaluate the adoption of an Azure CDN (Azure Content Delivery Network). According to Chinese law, the use of the CDN service in China could also subject an offshore website to the ICP registration. It is not recommended to use a global CDN service that does not have a point of presence (PoP) within mainland China.

Purchase options, costs and support

For information regarding the purchasing process and end-to-end onboarding for both Chinese and foreign users who are considering the adoption of Microsoft Azure services managed by 21Vianet in China (“Azure Services in China”) you can consult this guide, made following the customer's perspective.

The details on the costs of the various Azure China services can be found in this dedicated portal.

To get a complete view of the support plans in Azure China you can consult this page.

Conclusions

To ensure an effective distribution of your workloads in Azure China there are several aspects to consider such as which legal entity will manage your Azure China account, the level of compatibility of your applications with Azure services running in China, the Great Firewall and the migration and replication strategy to use. However, there are several companies that have long relied on Azure China and it is possible to consult the many success stories in this page.

Azure Management services: what's new in September 2021

In September there were several news announced by Microsoft regarding Azure management services. In this summary, which I report on a monthly basis, major announcements are listed, accompanied by the necessary references to be able to conduct further studies on.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

Support for Availability Zones is available

Azure Monitor has introduced support for Availability Zones that help protect applications and data from datacenter failures and can provide resilience for Azure Monitor features such as Application Insights and any other functionality that relies on a Log Analytics workspace. When a workspace is linked to an availability zone, Azure Monitor remains active and operational even if a specific datacenter is not functional or completely inactive. Azure Monitor currently supports Availability Zones for the following regions: East US 2 and West US 2.

Cross query between Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer

The ability to query between Azure Monitor and Azure Data Explorer allows you to query data exported to Azure Data Explorer or Azure blob storage and merge them with any Azure Monitor Log Analytics workspace.

Among the various features recently released we find the ability to perform queries:

  • Between Azure Data Explorer and Azure Monitor services (Log Analytics / Application Insights) and vice versa
  • On Azure Monitor logs exported from an Azure blob storage account using Azure Data Explorer

In Azure Monitor Log Analytics, the maximum data retention time frame is limited to 2 years. This aspect can be limiting in some areas, to the point that certain compliance criteria are not met. To overcome this limitation, you can export logs to an Azure blob storage. This new feature allows you to cross-query by including data exported to Azure blob storage in an integrated way.

Support for Windows Server 2022 for the Azure Monitor Agent

The Azure Monitor Agent is now also supported for Windows Server 2022 such as virtual machines, virtual machine scale sets and Arc enabled servers (in on-premise environments and / or non-Azure servers).

New version of the agent for Linux systems

A new version of the Log Analytics agent has been released this month for Linux systems where several improvements and greater stability are introduced. Furthermore, the OMI component has been updated to version 1.6.8 and introduced support for AWS 2 / Centos 8.4 Linux.

Configure

Azure Automation

Support for the Az module

Azure Automation introduces support for the module “Az”, available by default for all new Automation Accounts. Furthermore, the option is present in the Azure portal “Update Az Modules” which allows you to update the modules to “Az” for existing Automation Accounts.

Govern

Azure Policy

Support for AKS custom policy (preview)

Microsoft has announced in preview support for custom policies for Azure Kubernetes Service clusters (AKS). With this feature, it is possible to create and assign custom policy definitions and constraint templates to AKS clusters, see advanced information about any errors, use the embedded constraint template embedded within the policy definition and more.

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, 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, including:

Secure

Azure Security Center

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center 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.

Protect

Azure Backup

New alerts and management in the Backup center (preview)

Azure Backup has released a new Azure Monitor based alerting solution, which allows you to take advantage of the notification capabilities offered by Azure to monitor and effectively act on critical backup incidents. These alerts can also be managed directly by Azure Backup center.

Oracle snapshot with Azure Backup

Azure Backup now allows you to run pre-post scripts to deactivate and reactivate Oracle databases. This allows you to have consistent backups and take advantage of all the advantages of Azure VM backup also for Oracle systems. Database-consistent snapshots can be used for restores from Oracle, they are verifiable by Oracle database clients such as RMAN and have economic advantages as the backup of Azure VMs is intrinsically incremental. The ability to take consistent snapshots at the Oracle database level also means there is no need to stream the full daily data to a storage target, therefore it is possible to significantly reduce the I / O demand on the machine and on the network, as well as reducing the need for large storage spaces. Furthermore, the use of these snapshots guarantees the ability to quickly create clones of Oracle production VMs and it is not necessary to perform intensive I / O operations such as a datapump.

Offline backup with Azure Data Box

Microsoft has made the Azure Offline Backup functionality available using Azure Data Box, which allows you to use Azure Data Box to seed large initial backups offline in an Azure Recovery Service vault.

Azure Site Recovery

New features to simplify the DR scenarios of VMs in a VMware environment (preview)

The following changes have been released in preview in ASR to help improve the activation of Disaster Recovery scenarios for VMware environments:

  • Automatic updates for the ASR replication appliance and for the Mobility agent. A limitation of the current ASR architecture is the need to manually update the various components of the configuration server and the Mobility service. To make things easier, Microsoft has introduced the ability to update automatically: when an update is made available, both the appliance (configuration server) and the Mobility service can be updated automatically. Furthermore, to perform automatic updates, the machine's root / admin credentials are no longer required.
  • Scalability improvements. The appliance becomes a single management unit where all its components have been converted into microservices hosted in an Azure environment. Not only will this make troubleshooting a lot easier, but managing the scalability of the solution will also be easier.
  • High availability for the appliance. Appliance resilience is a required feature and, thanks to this review, it is no longer necessary to perform regular backups of the appliance, but just start a new appliance and transfer all protected machines to the new appliance, without having to repeat a full replication.

Upgrade al TLS 1.2 or later

As part of the Microsoft initiative that provides for Azure to use TLS 1.2 by default and removing dependencies from previous versions, Azure Site Recovery is moving away from legacy protocols to ensure greater security for replication data. Therefore, TLS 1.0 e TLS 1.1 they will no longer be supported. These changes will take effect on 15 November 2021. To continue using Azure Site Recovery without interruption, you should make sure that all the resources that use the Microsoft Azure Recovery Services agent (MARS) are enabled for the use of TLS 1.2 or later.

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.

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 (September 2021 – Weeks: 37 and 38)

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

Azure VMware Solution achieves FedRAMP High Authorization

With this certification, U.S. government and public sector customers can now use Azure VMware Solution as a compliant FedRAMP cloud computing environment, ensuring it meets the demanding standards for security and information protection.

JetStream Disaster Recovery for Azure VMware Solution (preview)

JetStream Disaster Recovery is now available on Azure VMware Solution in public preview, enabling DR protection needed for business and mission-critical applications. JetStream Disaster Recovery on Azure VMware Solution is also cost-effective, as it uses minimal resources at the DR site by leveraging cloud storage, such as Azure Blob Storage.

Azure AD-joined VMs support

With this latest update, you can now:

  • Join your Azure Virtual Desktop virtual machines directly to Azure Active Directory (Azure AD.)
  • Connect to the virtual machine from any device with basic credentials.
  • Automatically enroll the virtual machines with Microsoft Endpoint Manager.

Management Group Scope for Azure Reservations (preview)

You can scope a reservation to a management group. When you set the scope to a management group, the reservation discount is applied to matching resources in the list of subscriptions that are a part of the management group and the billing context.

Storage

Azure Archive Storage now available in three new regions

Azure Archive Storage provides a secure, low-cost means for retaining cold data including backup and archival storage. Now, Azure Archive Storage is available in three new regions: Norway East, UAE North, and Germany West Central.

Azure IaaS and Azure Stack: announcements and updates (September 2021 – Weeks: 35 and 36)

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

On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Virtual Machines (preview)

On-demand capacity reservations for Azure Virtual Machines, now in public preview, enable IT organization to reserve compute capacity for a VM size. The reservation can be for any length of time in any public Azure region or Availability Zone and supports most VM series. You can create and cancel an on-demand capacity reservation at any time, no commitment is required. The ability for you to access compute capacity, with SLA guarantees when on-demand capacity reservations become generally available, ahead of actual VM deployments is particularly important to ensure the availability of business-critical applications running on Azure. On-demand capacity reservations can be combined with Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs) to significantly reduce costs.

Run Commands for Azure VMware Solution (preview)

Run commands are a collection of PowerShell packages available in the Azure VMware Solution portal that simplify the execution of certain operations on vCenter. With this announcement your cloud administrator can now more easily run management tasks that require elevated privileges.

Automatic scaling with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode (preview)

Microsoft has enabled elastic virtual machine profile and automatic scaling for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets with flexible orchestration elastic profile and automatic scaling. The features are now in public preview, and provide:

  • Up to 1000 instances in a scale set (general purpose virtual machine sizes only)
  • Ability to manually add VM instances to the scale set
  • The option to spread instances across fault domains automatically, or specify a fault domain
  • Place on demand and Spot VMs in the same scale set
  • (New) Define a VM profile and specify instance count
  • (New) Automatically scale out and scale in based on metrics, schedule, or AI prediction (private preview)
  • (New) In guest patching that respects high availability / FD constraints
  • (New) Automatic extension updates
  • (New) Automatic instance repair/replacement of unhealthy instances
  • (New) Terminate notification for on demand and Spot VMs
  • (New) Secure by default networking – customers must explicitly define outbound connectivity
  • (New) Improved scale out and scale in reliability, latency, and elasticity

Storage

Azure Files: SMB 3.1.1 support, SMB Multichannel and storage capacity reservation

Server Message Block (SMB) 3.1.1 is the most recent version of the SMB protocol, released with Windows 10, containing important security and performance updates. Azure Files SMB 3.1.1 ships with two additional encryption modes, AES-128-GCM and AES-256-GCM, in addition to AES-128-CCM which was already supported. In addition to SMB 3.1.1, Azure Files exposes security settings that change the behavior of the SMB protocol. With this release, you may configure allowed SMB protocol versions, SMB channel encryption options, authentication methods, and Kerberos ticket encryption options. By default, Azure Files enables the most compatible options, however these options may be toggled at any time.

Server Message Block (SMB) Multichannel enables you to improve the IO performance of your SMB client 2-4x, increasing performance and decreasing total cost of ownership.

Storage capacity reservations for Azure Files enable you to significantly reduce the total cost of ownership of storage by pre-committing to storage utilization. To achieve the lowest costs in Azure, you should consider reserving capacity for all production workloads.

Zone redundant storage (ZRS) for Azure Disk Storage

Zone redundant storage (ZRS) for Azure Disk Storage is now generally available on Azure Premium SSDs and Standard SSDs in West Europe, North Europe, West US 2 and France Central regions. Disks with ZRS provide synchronous replication of data across the zones in a region, enabling disks to tolerate zonal failures which may occur due to natural disasters or hardware issues. They also enable you to maximize your virtual machine availability without the need for application-level replication of data across zones, which is not supported by many legacy applications such as old versions of SQL or industry-specific proprietary software. This means that, if a virtual machine becomes unavailable in an affected zone, you can continue to work with the disk by mounting it to a virtual machine in a different zone. You can also use the ZRS option with shared disks to provide improved availability for clustered or distributed applications like SQL FCI, SAP ASCS/SCS, or GFS2.

Automatic key rotation of customer-managed keys for encrypting Azure disks

Azure Disk Storage now enables you to automatically rotate keys for encryption of your data.

Change performance tiers for Azure Premium SSDs with no downtime

On Azure Premium SSDs, you can now change the performance tiers without any downtime to your application (generally available). You can change the performance tier of a disk even when it is attached to running virtual machines. For planned events like a seasonal sales promotion or running a training environment, you need to achieve sustained higher performance for a few hours or days and then return to the normal performance levels. With performance tiers on Premium SSDs, you have the flexibility to scale the disk performance without increasing the disk size by selecting a higher performance tier. You can also change tiers to bring it back to your baseline performance tier, enabling you to achieve higher performance and cost savings.

Networking

New updates to Azure Firewall

New Azure Firewall capabilities:

  • Azure Firewall supports US West 3, Jio India West, and Brazil Southeast.
  • Auto-generated self-signed certificates for Azure Firewall Premium SKU.
  • Secure Hub now supports Availability Zones.
  • Deploy Azure Firewall without public IP in Forced Tunnel mode.
  • Configure pre-existing Azure Firewalls in Force Tunnel mode using stop or start commands.

Azure Route Server

Azure Route Server simplifies dynamic routing between your network virtual appliance (NVA) and your virtual network. When you establish a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) peering between your NVA and Azure Router Server, you can advertise IP addresses from your NVA to your virtual network. Your NVA will also learn what IP addresses your virtual network has. Azure Route Server is a fully managed service and is configured with high availability.

Several key Azure Route Server benefits include:

  • Simplify network appliance operations
  • Deploy it in your existing setup
  • Support any network appliance
  • Enable new network topology

Private Link Network Security Group Support (preview)

Private Endpoint support for Network Security Groups (NSGs) is now in public preview. This feature enhancement will provide you with the ability to enable advanced security controls on traffic destined to a private endpoint. In order to leverage this feature, you will need to set a specific subnet level property, called PrivateEndpointNetworkPolicies, to Enabled. In addition to toggling this property, you will need to also register for the Microsoft.Network/AllowPrivateEndpointNSG feature.

Private Link UDR Support (preview)

Private Endpoint support for User Defined Routes (UDRs) is now in public preview. This feature enhancement will provide you with the ability to apply custom routes to traffic destined to a private endpoint with a wider subnet range. In order to leverage this feature, you will need to set a specific subnet level property, called PrivateEndpointNetworkPolicies, to Enabled. In addition to toggling this property, you will need to also register for the Microsoft.Network/AllowPrivateEndpointNSG feature.

Address changes on an Azure virtual network that has active peerings (preview)

You can now update your virtual network address space without needing to remove the peering links on their virtual networking and incurring any downtime.

Azure ExpressRoute: new ExpressRoute Direct and Peering locations

New locations are available for ExpressRoute Direct:

  • Denver
  • Newport (Wales)
  • Pune

The new locations support dual 10Gbps or 100Gbps connectivity into Microsoft’s global network.

New peering locations are available for ExpressRoute:

  • Chicago2
  • Pune
  • Seoul2

Azure Management services: what's new in August 2021

Microsoft constantly releases news about Azure management services. By publishing this summary, we want to provide an overall overview of the main news released in the last month. This allows you to stay up-to-date on these topics and have the necessary references to conduct further investigations.

The following diagram shows the different areas related to management, which are covered in this series of articles, in order to stay up to date on these topics and to better deploy and maintain applications and resources.

Figure 1 – Management services in Azure overview

Monitor

Azure Monitor

The IT Service Management Connector is certified with the Quebec version of ServiceNow

The IT Service Management Connector (ITSM) of Azure Monitor is now certified for the Quebec version of ServiceNow. This connector allows you to establish a two-way connection between Azure and ITSM tools, useful for managing incidents and solving problems faster. Furthermore, it is possible to create work items in the ITSM tool, based on Azure alerts(Metric Alerts, Activity Log Alerts, e Log Analytics alert).

Lower levels for reservations for Azure Monitor dedicated clusters

Microsoft has reduced the capacity reservation (capacity reservation) minimum required for Azure Monitor dedicated clusters, bringing it from 1.000 GB to 500 GB per day. This allows you to take advantage of advanced features such as customer-managed keys, lockbox, and infrastructure encryption, even to customers with lower data entry volume.

The retirement of the Log Analytics agent has been announced

Microsoft announced that the 31 August 2024 the Log Analytics agent used in Azure Monitor will be retired. Therefore, before that date, you should use the new Azure Monitor agent (AMA) and data collection rules (DCR) of Azure Monitor to monitor virtual machines and servers.

Configure

Azure Automation

New features coming soon to be released

Microsoft has announced that the following new features will soon be released for Azure Automation:

  • Azure AD support: ability to use Azure AD-based authentication for public automation endpoints
  • Support for Powershell 7: ability to run Azure Automation runbooks, in production scenarios, using PowerShell 7.1
  • Azure Automation Hybrid Worker Extension for Azure and for Azure Arc machines: possibility of onboarding hybrid workers using the hybrid extension for Azure and Azure Arc machines.
  • Support for Availability Zones, useful for increasing the levels of reliability and resilience.
  • Native support of the Powershell Az module.

Govern

Azure Policy

Azure Guest Configuration Policy: possibility of applying settings within the systems as well (preview)

Guest Configuration Policies allow you to control settings within a machine, both for virtual machines running in Azure environment and for "Arc Connected" machines. At the moment, most of the Azure Guest Configuration Policies only allow you to make checks on the settings inside the machine, but they do not apply configurations. However, Microsoft has announced in preview the possibility to apply configurations provided by Microsoft or to create your own configuration packages using PowerShell DSC version 3.

Azure Cost Management

Updates related toAzure Cost Management and Billing

Microsoft is constantly looking for new methodologies to improve Azure Cost Management and Billing, 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

Azure Security Center

Azure Defender for SQL available from Azure SQL Virtual Machine blade

This new Azure Defender information browsing experience for SQL VMs, allows you to view, directly from the SQL virtual machine panel, information about security best practices for related SQL Server databases.

New features, bug fixes and deprecated features of Azure Security Center

Azure Security Center 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:

Protect

Azure Backup

Support for Archive storage for backup of VMs and SQL on board VMs

In Azure Backup, you can now move recovery points to save costs and keep your backup data longer. This feature is available for Azure VMs and SQL Servers installed on board Azure VMs. Using Azure PowerShell, it is possible to move these backups from the standard tier to the new archive tier.

When moving backup data from vault-standard to vault-archive, Azure Backup converts incremental data into full backup. This procedure involves an increase in the total GB used, but costs are reduced due to the huge difference in cost per GB between the two storage tiers. To simplify this process, Azure Backup provides advice on Recovery Points (RPs) for which migration to the vault-archive is recommended. Restores can be done in an integrated way from the Azure portal, with a simple and intuitive process.

Azure Site Recovery

ASR support for global disaster recovery

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) introduced support for cross-continental disaster recovery. Thanks to this feature, a virtual machine can be replicated from an Azure region in one continent to a region in another continent. In the event of a planned or unplanned outage, you will be able to fail over the virtual machine on all continents and, once the interruption has been mitigated, it can be brought back to the continent of origin (fail-back) and protected.

Extended the date of withdrawal of Hard coded IP address

Microsoft has extended the retirement date for hard coded IP addresses to connect with Azure Site Recovery services to 31 August 2024. This allows you to have more time to adjust the configurations of the environments to use the Azure service tags.

Migrate

Azure Migrate

Software inventory and agentless dependency analysis

In Azure Migrate it is now possible to inventory applications, roles and features installed and perform dependency analysis, on Windows and Linux servers, without installing any agent. Agentless dependency analysis allows you to identify and understand dependencies between servers, supporting data collection for up to 1000 servers at the same time.

Discovery and assessment of ASP.NET Web Apps with Azure Migrate (preview)

Azure Migrate now allows you to identify and assess ASP.NET Web Apps running on the on-premises IIS Web server and manage their migration. Until now, it was necessary to use tools such as App Service Migration Assistant to evaluate the Web Apps. Thanks to the introduction of this feature in Azure Migrate, it is possible to discover the .NET Web Apps running in your VMware environment and create assessments to manage the migration to Azure IaaS or Azure App Service.

Containerization of apps and migration to AKS or Azure App Service

The Azure Migrate app containerization tool allows you to modernize existing ASP.NET and Java web applications, using a containerization approach that requires little or no application changes. The tool groups existing applications running on servers in a container image and allows them to be deployed in containers running in Azure Kubernetes Service(AKS) or in Azure App Service. As part of the migration process, the tool allows you to parameterize the application configurations, outsource file system dependencies using persistent volumes and configure the containerized application monitor using Application Insights.

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.

Evaluation of Azure

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