News

Azure Enhancements Outlined at the Microsoft Inspire Partner Event

• By Kurt Mackie
• 07/19/2023

Microsoft described a bunch of Azure enhancements at its Inspire event for partners.

Partners can help steer customers toward "more resilient infrastructure" by helping with Azure migrations. They also can apply their own artificial intelligence solutions to "accelerate" AI's  value with customers, suggested Alysa Taylor, Microsoft's corporate vice president for Azure and industry, in a Tuesday announcement.

Improved Azure tools for partners were announced this week, plus partner program additions. The program enhancements represent "an unprecedented three times investment" by Microsoft in its partner community, according to Taylor.

New and Revamped Azure Partner Programs
Microsoft has revamped and renamed its flagship Azure program for partners. It also added a new program called "Azure Innovate."

The flagship Azure Migration and Modernization Program is now called "Azure Migrate and Modernize." It was described as getting "deeper partner incentives, as well as support for additional workloads like high performance computing (HPC), Oracle, Linux, SAP, and mainframe migrations," per this Tuesday Azure blog announcement.

The new Azure Innovate program aims to assist partners with "advanced innovation needs such as infusing AI into your apps and experiences, advanced analytics, and building custom cloud native applications." It'll provide partners with guided assistance through the various stages, "from planning to development." Microsoft also will assist partners in "deploying your own AI copilot using your data." The new Azure Innovate program represents a "dedicated $100M plus investment we are making in response to the heightened demands for analytics and AI," Taylor indicated.

The workloads supported by these two Azure partner programs were illustrated in the following graphic:

Azure Migrate Enhancements
The free Azure Migrate tool has been updated to let partners "analyze cost more comprehensively" prior to cloud migrations, and it will help them "generate a business case with security features," according to this Tuesday Azure blog. Microsoft has also worked with Tanium to analyze "real-time operational data" when presenting a business case for Azure migrations.

Azure Migrate now addresses the coming end-of-support milestones for Windows Server 2012 and later products by supporting "in-place upgrades." Windows Server 2012 is set to fall out of support on Oct 10, 2023. Partners can "detect and mitigate any app-compatibility risks by upgrading to a test environment in Azure without any impact on production workloads." The Azure Migrate tool creates a replica of the original server to address possible issues, and it's able to "upgrade up to 500 servers in parallel while migrating to Azure."

System Center Operations Manager for Migration Planning
Microsoft described a new capability in System Center Operations Manager that will let users generate a business case for Azure migrations. It works with the Azure Migrate tool, a Tuesday System Center blog explained:

This new capability in SCOM allows you to discover and understand everything you need to know about your on-premises environment by generating a complete inventory that can be used in Azure Migrate to assess machines at scale with a comprehensive business case analysis calculating cost savings from migration and modernization.

Microsoft promised to improve the overall cost assessments generated by this new capability in System Center Operations Manager by adding a "Management costs & capabilities" feature to it at some point.

Azure Arc Support for Extended Security Updates (Preview)
Azure Arc, Microsoft's multicloud management tool, now lets users "purchase and seamlessly deploy" Extended Security Updates (ESUs) for both multicloud and on-premises environments. This capability is currently available now at the preview stage for SQL Server 2012, "with billing starting in September 2023." It will be available for Windows Server in September 2023, per an Azure update announcement.

ESUs offer a year of security-only patch support for Windows Server and SQL Server products that have exceeded their lifecycle support dates. The ESU Program just permits three years total of extended support. It was priced much like an insurance plan, with the costs going up each year. Update 7/20: However, a Microsoft spokesperson clarified that "as of yesterday, our pricing pages were updated to reflect that the price of ESUs does not go up each year; it is the same price for all 3 years." Microsoft offers ESUs for free for organizations when they move their on-premises server workloads to Azure virtual machines.

One advantage of deploying ESUs via Azure Arc is that users get "more flexibility with a pay-as-you-go subscription model, compared to the classic ESU offered through the Volume Licensing Center which are purchased in yearly increments," the announcement explained. Microsoft also argued that "Extended Security enabled by Azure Arc is the best way for customers to get trusted security updates and benefit from cloud capabilities including discovery, management, and patching, all in one offering," per this Azure Arc blog announcement.

Azure Arc SSH Support General Availability
Microsoft announced that SSH support when using Azure Arc reached the general availability stage this month. It enables secure connections to Azure Arc via command-line interfaces, the announcement explained:

SSH for Azure Arc enables you to securely connect to any of your Azure Arc-enabled servers via SSH, without the need for a public IP address or additional inbound ports. This allows you to SSH into your Azure Arc-enabled servers via an Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell command.

Azure Boost Preview
Microsoft on Tuesday announced an Azure Boost preview for organizations tapping Azure's higher end networking and storage capacities. Azure Boost enables the "fastest" storage at a throughput of "up to 10 GBps and 400K IOPS," along with "200 Gbps networking throughput."

Azure Boost achieves its networking and performance gains by switching out traditional hypervisor and host OS processes onto dedicated software and hardware, the announcement explained:

By separating hypervisor and host OS functions from the host infrastructure, Azure Boost enables greater network and storage performance at scale, improves security by adding another layer of logical isolation, and reduces the maintenance impact for future Azure software and hardware upgrades.

Azure Boost is a software and hardware component of the Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA), which is also at the preview stage. MANA is an Azure "next-generation network interface" that's designed to optimize the networking performance of Linux- and Window-based virtual machines.

Microsoft is currently using Azure Boost with its higher performance Azure VM product offerings. It's being used to enhance the "remote storage performance of the Ebsv5 VM series and networking throughput and latency improvements for the entire Ev5 and Dv5 VM series," the announcement indicated.

Crash-Consistent Restore Points Preview
Microsoft is previewing Crash-Consistent Restore Points for Azure virtual Machines, per an announcement. It's an agentless solution that "stores the VM configuration and point-in-time write-order consistent snapshots for all managed disks attached to a VM."

Crash-Consistent Restore Points supports Windows and Linux guest operating systems and can be set for "1 hour frequency enabling lower RPO [restore point objective] for applications running on Azure VMs."

Azure Confidential Computing Support for Azure Virtual Desktop
Microsoft also announced that Azure Virtual Desktop, its virtual desktop service offering, now can run on "confidential VMs" by using the Azure Confidential Computing service.

The capability, which encrypts processes when running, is now at the "general availability" release stage. Microsoft currently offers Azure Confidential Computing support for Azure Virtual Desktop when running an "AMD SEV-SNP DCasv5 or ECasv5-series confidential VM for their Windows 11 virtual desktop."