What’s new for your VMs?
Several new additions have been added for running your virtual machines in Azure. Many of those expand the offerings for general purpose, memory-intensive, and remote virtualization use cases (like running VMware implementations natively).
- Ea v4, Eas v4, Da v4, and Das v4 series VMs are now available. Azure was the first world wide cloud provider to offer VMs running on AMD’s EPYC 7452 processors. These are now available to run both Windows and Linux workloads. The upper limits offers 96 vCPUs, 762 GiBs of RAM, and 2,400 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage. Coming soon is Ultra Disk support for the Das and Eas series.NVv4 series is now in preview mode. Utilizing AMD EPYC 7742 processors, this will be the first offering with AMD RADEON INSTINCT MI25 GPUs for graphics intense desktops. Users will be able to set GPU memory from as low as 2GB for entry level desktops, all the way up to 16GB for running engineering workstations in the cloud.
- For those running containers, Azure monitor is in preview to provide Hybrid Monitoring as well as support offered for Prometheus.
- Azure VMware Solutions are now live in the West Europe Azure region. As a reminder, Microsoft and VMware teamed up to provide an opportunity to extend your VMware environments in your data centers into Azure, natively. With this, it is possible to still utilize existing VMware tools such as vSphere, vSan and vCenter while adopting Azure services such as Azure Active Directory and AI.
- Azure Bastion is now generally available. This is a managed service that will provide more secure RDP and SSH access into your private virtual networks via SSL from the public internet directly via the Azure portal.
- Preview: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets features. Coming soon, users will be able to create empty virtual machine scale sets and add VMs (even coming from different VM series) later during the VM construction process. This will aid in high availability by allowing you to deploy new VMs to a single availability zone and/or across different fault domains. This will also allow you to use Scale Sets to create SQL high availability clusters with high availability in a zone. This helps in providing HA for primary, secondary, and witness machines in their own fault domains while still providing low network latency between the machines.
- For latency sensitive applications, Proximity placement groups has become generally available. This will allow you to create placement groups of VMs that Azure will automatically place closer together.
- Azure Spot VMs will be available soon to utilize extra/unused Azure capacity at greatly reduced rates. These are great for workloads that can be stopped and started with no ill-effects. This will be in preview early 2020.
More Ignite Announcements can be found here: Microsoft Ignite Announcements.