Monat: April 2019

Microsoft Azure portal April 2019 update

This month’s updates include improvements to IaaS, Azure Data Explorer, Security Center, Recovery Services, Role-Based Access Control, Support, and Intune.

Sign in to the Azure portal now and see for yourself everything that’s new. Download the Azure mobile app to stay connected to your Azure resources anytime, anywhere.

Here’s the list of April updates to the Azure portal:

IaaS

Improved create experience for Managed Disks
Use non-ASCII characters for virtual machine names

Azure Data Explorer

New full-screen Create Cluster experience

Security Center

Public preview: Adaptive network hardening in Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center adaptive application control updates
Support for virtual network peering in Azure Security Center
Azure Security Center: Secure score impact changes

Azure Site Recovery

Replication to managed disks

Role-Based Access Control

New Classic administrators tab

Support

Updated support request experience

Other

Updates to Microsoft Intune

IAAS

Improved create experience for Managed Disks

Managed disks now have the latest UI pattern for creating resources in Azure. This updated flow eliminates horizontal scrolling during the creation workflow and follows the same UI patterns that we use in other popular services like VM, Storage, Cosmos DB and AKS, resulting in easier to learn and better customer experiences.

Use of non-ASCII characters for virtual machine names

We loosened the restrictions on the characters you can use to name a virtual machine in the portal to include non-ASCII characters. Azure virtual machine naming in the portal is constrained by two sets of rules: Azure resource naming rules and guest operating system hostname naming rules, which can be more restrictive. With this release, we allow more Unicode characters in the virtual machine name, which is used as both the Azure resource name and the guest hostname. While the Azure resource name is immutable, you can update the in-guest hostname after the VM is created.

Azure Data Explorer

New full-screen Create Cluster experience

We've changed the way users create clusters. The new experience contains the new UX pattern of "review + create" which appears in several Azure products.

Security Center

Public preview: Adaptive network hardening

Azure Security Center can now learn the network traffic and connectivity patterns of your Azure workload and provide you with network security group (NSG) rule recommendations for your internet-facing virtual machines. This is called adaptive network hardening, and it's now in public preview. It helps you secure connections to and from the public internet (made by workloads running in the public cloud), which are one of the most common attack surfaces.

It can be hard to know which NSG rules should be in place to make sure that Azure workloads are available only to required source ranges. These new recommendations in Security Center help you configure your network access policies and limit your exposure to attacks. Security Center uses machine learning to fully automate this process, including an automated enforcement mechanism. These recommendations also use Microsoft’s extensive threat intelligence reports to make sure that known malicious actors are blocked.

To view these recommendations, in the Security Center portal, select Networking and then Adaptive network hardening.

Adaptive application control updates

In Azure Security Center, adaptive application control in audit mode is now available for Azure Linux VMs. This whitelisting solution is also available for non-Azure Windows and Linux VMs and servers that are connected to Security Center.

In addition, you can now rename groups of virtual machine and server clusters in Security Center. They're still automatically named group1, group2, and so on. But you can then edit them to provide a more meaningful name to your machine cluster groups to help you better represent those application control policy groups. Learn more about automated end-to-end application control in Security Center by visiting our documentation, “Adaptive application controls in Azure Security Center.”

Support for virtual network peering

The network map in Azure Security Center now supports virtual network peering. You can view directly from the network map allowed traffic flows between peered virtual networks and deep dive into the connections and entities.

Secure score impact changes

In Azure Security Center, the number for secure score impact represents how much your overall secure score will improve if you follow recommendations.

Security Center fine tunes the score of the recommendations, continuously adjusting them to make sure they reflect the necessary prioritization. As part of this effort, the secure score has changed for several recommendations. The change might affect your overall secure score. You can learn more about secure score by visiting our documentation, “Improve your secure score in Azure Security Center.”

Azure Site Recovery

Replication to managed disks

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) now supports disaster recovery of VMware virtual machines and physical servers by directly replicating to Managed Disks. All new protections now have this capability available on the Azure portal. In order to enable replication for a machine, you no longer need to create storage accounts. For more details, refer to the announcement blog post, “Simplify disaster recovery with Managed Disks for VMware and physical servers.”

Role-based access control

New Classic administrators tab

If you are still using the classic deployment model, we've consolidated the management of Co-administrators on a new tab named Classic administrators. If you need to add or remove Co-administrators, you can use this new tab. To learn more about this tab, see Azure classic subscription administrators.

To see the new Classic administrators tab:

In the Azure portal, select All services and then Subscriptions.
Select your subscription.
Select Access control (IAM) and then the Classic administrators tab.

Support

Updated support request experience

We have updated the support request creation experience, improving screen real estate usage and creating better interaction patterns.

During support case creation, customers can take advantage of our rich self-help content and diagnostics to troubleshoot their issues and get immediate solutions to their problems. The self-help and troubleshooting steps are available to all customers, including those that have not purchased a technical support plan with Microsoft.

Other

Updates to Microsoft Intune

The Microsoft Intune team has been hard at work on updates as well. You can find the full list of updates to Intune on the “What's new in Microsoft Intune” page, including changes that affect your experience using Intune.

Azure portal “how to” video series

Have you checked out our Azure portal “how to” video series yet? The videos highlight specific aspects of the portal so you can be more efficient and productive while deploying your cloud workloads from the portal. Recent videos include a demonstration of how to create a storage account and upload a blob and how to create an Azure Kubernetes Service cluster in the portal. Keep checking our playlist on YouTube for a new video each week.

Next steps

The Azure portal’s large team of engineers always wants to hear from you, so please keep providing us with your feedback in the comments section below or on Twitter @AzurePortal.

Don’t forget to sign in the Azure portal and download the Azure mobile app today to see everything that’s new. See you next month!
Quelle: Azure

Self-service exchange and refund for Azure Reservations

Azure Reservations provide flexibility to help meet your evolving needs. You can exchange a reservation for another reservation of the same type, and you can refund a reservation if you no longer need it.

Exchange an existing reserved instance

You start the exchange in the Azure portal with Azure Reservations.

1. Select the reservations that you want to refund and choose Exchange.

2. Select the SKU you want to purchase and provide quantity. Make sure that the new purchase total is more than the return total. Determine the right size before you purchase.

3. Review and complete the transaction.

For refunding a reservation, go to reservation details and select Refund.

How the return and exchange transactions are processed

First, Microsoft cancels the existing reservation and refunds the pro-rated amount for that reservation. If there is an exchange, the new purchase is processed. Microsoft processes refunds using one of the following methods, depending on your account type and payment method:

Refund processing for enterprise agreement customers

If the original purchase was made using a monetary commitment, then the money is added back to the monetary commitment for both exchange and refunds. Any overage invoices since the original purchase are re-opened and re-rated to make sure that the monetary commitment is used. If the monetary commitment term using the reservation was purchased and is no longer active, then credit will be added to your current enterprise agreement monetary commitment term.

If the original purchase was made as overage, we issue a credit memo.

Refund processing for pay-as-you-go customers with invoice payment method and Cloud solution provider program

The original reservation purchase invoice is cancelled and then a new invoice is created for the refund. For exchange the new invoice has both the refund and the new purchase. The refund amount is adjusted against the purchase. If you only refunded a reservation, then the prorated amount stays with Microsoft and it is adjusted against a future reservation purchase.

Refund processing for pay-as-you-go customers who use credit card payment method

The original invoice is cancelled and a new invoice is created. The money is refunded to the credit card that was used for the original purchase. If you’ve since changed your card, please contact support.

Exchange policies

You can return multiple existing reservations to purchase a new reservation of the same type. You can’t exchange reservations of one type for another. For example, you can’t return a virtual machine (VM) reservation to purchase a SQL reservation.
Only reservation order owners can process an exchange. Learn how to add or change users who can manage a reservation.
An exchange is processed as a refund and repurchased, different transactions are created for the cancellation and the new purchase. The pro-rated reservation amount is refunded for the reservations that you trade-in. You are charged fully for the new purchase. The pro-rated reservation amount is the daily pro-rated residual value of the reservation being returned.
Reservations can be exchanged or refunded even if the enterprise agreement using which the reservation was purchased has expired and has since renewed into a new enterprise agreement.
You can change any reservation property such as size, region, quantity, and term with the exchange.
The new purchase total should equal or be greater than the returned amount.
The new reservation purchased as part of exchange has a new term starting from the time of exchange.
There is no penalty or annual limits for exchanges.

Refund policies

Your total refund is subject to a maximum amount within a 12-month rolling window. To learn more, refer to our refund policies.
Only reservation order owners can process a refund. Learn how to add or change users who can manage a reservation.
Microsoft reserves the right to charge a 12 percent penalty for any returns, although the penalty is not currently charged.

Exchanging a reservation purchased for a VM size that doesn’t support premium storage for VM size that supports premium storage

In order to exchange reservations purchased from VM sizes that don’t support premium storage, to corresponding VM sizes that do support premium storage, go to the reservation details and select Exchange. Such an exchange doesn’t reset the term of the reserved instance or lead to a new transaction.
Quelle: Azure