On April 16th 2013, the Windows Azure team has announced that Windows Azure Infrasructure Services ( Virtual Machines and Virtual Networks ) has been released for General Availability ( GA )! The local Azure User Group also held a Azure Global Boot Camp on 27th April.
New VM Sizes
There are two new VM size being released to support memory-hungry VMs on Windows Azure, such as SQL Server and SharePoint Server workloads,
- NEW! VM Size A6 ( 4 Virtual Cores / 28 GB RAM )
- NEW! VM Size A7 ( 8 Virtual Cores / 56 GB RAM )
Workload deployment walkthrough
How do you really configure SQL AlwaysOn and SharePoint on Windows Azure VMs? Here are some official documents to help you out:
- Configure SQL AlwaysOn on Windows Azure VMs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj870963.aspx
- SharePoint Deployment on Windows Azure Virtual Machines http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=34598
Create Site-to-Site or Point-to-Site virtual networks
Once you deployed workloads like SQL or SharePoint, you need to connect to them through a secure channel to access or manage the workload.
I previously blogged about create site-to-site virtual network between on-premise datacenter to Azure – Hybrid Cloud – Expanding Datacenter into Azure IaaS
Now Azure IaaS is GA, a new capability Point-to-Site VPN connection. There are two main scenarios this enables
- Developers – Easily VPN to Azure from local machine
- Small medium businesses – Those do not own any VPN devices or have the expertise to deploy the site-to-site VPN. The VPN software to connect is built-into Windows it is really easy to enable and use.
Here is the steps on how to do it: How to Configure a Point-to-Site VPN in the Management Portal
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