With the announcement of the Microsoft Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs), Microsoft is competing with the traditional hosted cloud providers (MSP). With this program every Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) comparison for MSP Virtual Machines (VMs) hosting, or in the public cloud, can go straight into the archive… This is why….
When implementing a 3-2-1 backup strategy, one backup needs to be stored offsite. In a hybrid cloud environment, offsite will likely be the datacenter of your cloud provider. If you run VMware VMs in an on-premises datacenter and use Azure public cloud services, how can you copy a backup of a VM to Azure? Well, there are multiple solutions but every solution has it pros and cons. In this article we will shortly explain 2 solutions and compare them: Veeam Backup & Recovery 9.5 and Microsoft Backup Server (latest update). Continue reading
Since the Azure Stack Architecture blog became rather long, this blog will cover the second part. You can find part one here.
In Azure Stack TP2 there are only a handful VM sizes, but at GA a lot more VM sizes will be supported, although not all VM sizes can be accommodated yet because they require specific hardware configuration. Continu reading here
Source: Dive into Microsoft Azure Stack Architecture (part 2) | Azure Stack
DirSync & Azure AD Sync refused by Azure AD per December 31st. Upgrade to Azure AD Connect NOW!
Azure AD Connect is the best way to connect your on-premises directory with Azure AD and Office 365. The time to upgrade to Azure AD Connect from Windows Azure Active Directory Sync (DirSync) or Azure AD Sync has come! As these tools are now deprecated and will reach end of life on December 31, 2017.
At high level, we are bringing the Azure services into your datacenter on your hardware. We’re trying to provide consistency so you can take your workloads, deploy them in Azure or deploy them onprem to Azure Stack. You can move them back and forth for dev/test for regulatory reasons. There is a variety of reasons why you want the full ecosystem in place for Azure Stack. Continu reading here
Source: Dive into Microsoft Azure Stack Architecture (part 1) | Azure Stack
You can configure Azure Active Directory Domain Services (Azure AD DS) by using the new Azure portal (portal.azure.com). This feature is now GA (generally available) in all Azure regions that the service supports.
All existing managed domains have been migrated to the new portal from the Azure classic portal. You can configure and manage existing managed domains by using the new Azure portal.
To get started, see the documentation.
Microsoft announces new SQL Server 2017 images on Linux and Windows are now available in the Azure Marketplace! Deploying SQL Server in Azure VMs combines the industry-leading performance and security, built-in artificial intelligence, and business intelligence of SQL Server, now available on both Linux and Windows, with the flexibility, security, and hybrid connectivity of Azure.
More info Announcing new Azure VM images: SQL Server 2017 on Linux and Windows | Blog | Microsoft Azure
Azure has rolled out a new business model called a per-minute pricing model that helps in reducing the cost for shorter deployments.
Microsoft is hoping to attract new customers in the PaaS market with a per-minute pricing model that promises to reduce costs for many cloud deployments. For toddlers using Azure, when VM is stopped, the meter stops, instead of having to explicitly delete the deployment, while preserving the VM state and configuration. This makes it easier to stop VMs that are no longer being used and then restart them down the road.
In addition, Azure has rolled out a new business model called a per-minute pricing model that helps in reducing the cost for shorter deployments. Microsoft has also reduced the cost of spinning up a VM for developers to only 6 cents per hour. These results in massive cost savings for development and testing scenarios compared to any other cloud option on the market.
The recent roll out also include enhancements for Azure designed to improve the deployment, protection and analysis of media content. With the help of Media PaaS, organizations can stream video to HTML5, Flash, Silverlight, and Windows 8, iPad, iPhone, Android, Xbox and other clients via different streaming formats. This offering assures to overcome the tedious tasks involved in provisioning and managing a custom distribution infrastructure.
By leveraging Microsoft’s Dynamic packaging enables users to capture a single file format and stream to many adaptive protocol formats automatically. The packaging and conversion happens in real-time on the host server, which results in significant storage costs and time savings.
The “big three” public cloud providers are turning their sights to legacy workloads. It will be interesting to see how customers adopt and deploy VMware on AWS, Azure Stack and, now, Google Nested Virtualization.
One knock on public clouds from Google, Amazon, and even Microsoft is that they are terrific for brand-new software built to take advantage of their resources, but not so great for existing, older business software developed and deployed before the cloud era kicked off 10 years ago.
The cloud players are working to address that issue. Many companies don’t necessarily want to rebuild applications that run just fine so they can move to someone else’s cloud data centers.
Jim Naroski covers recent enhancements to Office 365, Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity solution for the modern workplace.
Complexity Simplified
IT & Virtualization Ramblings
Sharing knowledge, my vision, opinion and experience about virtual Infrastructure and Cloud
Cloud Astronaut 