Azure Marketplace new offers – Volume 41

We continue to expand the Azure Marketplace ecosystem. For this volume, 109 new offers successfully met the onboarding criteria and went live. See details of the new offers below:

Applications

Active Directory Domain Controller 2019: This virtual machine comes pre-loaded with the Active Directory Domain Services role, DNS server role, remote administration tools for Active Directory, DNS, and the required PowerShell modules.

ADQTM-aThingz Data Quality Tracking and Management: Improve operational efficiency, optimize cost, gain productivity, and eliminate recurring problems in your data with ADQTM’s seamless pre-built dashboards, KPIs, data models, machine learning, and cognitive features.

Anqlave Data Vault: Anqlave Data Vault is a secure and scalable key management system that leverages the Intel Software Guard Extensions technology on Azure and allows users to run and manage its Hardware Security Module on Azure.

ANS GLASS Cloud Management Portal: Managed Azure with ANS GLASS delivers business-critical cloud support to ensure you realize the full business value of Azure while keeping your business operationally agile and efficient in the cloud.

ArcBlock ABT Blockchain Node Taiwan: ArcBlock ABT Blockchain Node is fully decentralized and uses ArcBlock's blockchain development platform to easily build, run, and use DApps and blockchain-ready services.

ArcSight ArcMC 2.90: ArcSight Management Center (ArcMC) is a centralized security management system that manages large deployments of ArcSight solutions such as ArcSight Logger, SmartConnectors, FlexConnectors, and Connector Appliance through a single interface.

Array vAPV ADC for Azure: Array Networks vAPV is an easy-to-use, secure, high capacity application delivery controller that integrates with the Azure cloud environment while maintaining feature parity across physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments.

Attivo Networks ThreatDefend Deception: The Attivo ThreatDefend Deception Platform provides a comprehensive, customer-proven platform for proactive security and threat detection in user networks, data centers, clouds, and a variety of specialized attack surfaces.

Azure Blockchain Service Explorer: Azure Blockchain Service Explorer provides a rich interface for interpreting data on your ledger, with detailed views of tokens, contracts, accounts, transactions, and blocks.

Blue Ocean Note: Blue Ocean Note is a Software-as-a-Service care record management system for welfare facilities and nursery schools. This application is available only in Japanese.

BrightSkool: BrightSkool is designed to help schools manage challenges in a single unified solution. It is a reliable, affordable, web-based platform with a proven record of increased productivity and efficiency.

Cloud Edition for Lustre Client: Cloud Edition for Lustre Client is a scalable, parallel file system purpose-built for high performance computing (HPC) and ideally suited for dynamic, pay-as-you-go applications from rapid simulation and prototyping to peak HPC workloads.

Cloud Security Center: Ensure your cloud environments are equipped with the latest Microsoft 365 E5 Security features, yielding protection for user and administrator identities including all devices, applications, and data. This application is available only in Dutch.

Cloud Velocity: Cloud Velocity offers an “easy button” for monitoring Office 365. Devices are placed in critical locations, escalation protocols are defined, and then the outcomes simply happen: automated phone calls, emails, texts, alerts, and more.

CloudBees Jenkins Distribution: CloudBees Jenkins Distribution provides development teams with a highly dependable, secure Jenkins environment curated from the most recent supported Jenkins release. The distribution comes with a recommended catalog of tested plugins.

Corda Enterprise Virtual Machine: With Corda Enterprise Virtual Machine deployed on Microsoft Azure, developers can quickly and easily deploy nodes on a long-lived Corda network using pre-made cloud templates.

CrateDB Cloud: CrateDB Cloud is a scalable SQL cloud service hosted on Azure and operated 24/7 by Crate.io. It is ideal for industrial time series data processing and other IoT and machine data analytic workloads.

DataFabric for Azure: DataFabric automatically creates a live graph of stateful objects to represent real-world data sources, such as sensors, devices, and systems, and then dynamically interlinks these objects to maintain concurrency through a secure mesh of connections.

Datavard Glue: Datavard Glue seamlessly integrates your SAP landscape with big data applications running on Hadoop. Adapt big data technologies with no extra effort and leverage your SAP experience for big data operations.

DMX ETL: DMX enables data transformation to extract, transfer, and load data from multiple sources to on-premises SQL or Azure targets. DMX ETL is an easy-to-configure transformation tool that does not require coding or tuning.

DMX-H ETL: Syncsort’s DMX-H offers a single software environment for accessing and integrating all your enterprise data sources – both batch and streaming – while managing, governing, and securing the entire process.

eCourt: eCourt provides information and communication technology enablement for courts. It features an approval system at every stage in the court process, case approval notification, decentralized blockchain record storage, and more.

Ericom Connect VDI: Ericom Connect VDI provides virtual desktops running Windows 10 on Azure. The solution implements multifactor authentication and provides single sign-on, clientless access, and more. This application is available only in Japanese.

GAPTEQ | Low-Code-Platform: GAPTEQ is a professional front end for your SQL database. Use GAPTEQ to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server database or MySQL and then use its metadata, tables, logic, and data.

hd backup 365: Azure Backup replaces your existing on-premises or off-site backup solution with a cloud-based solution that is reliable, secure, and cost-competitive. This application is available only in Korean.

Human Risks: Human Risks is an online platform that enables you to manage the entire enterprise security risk management process from risk assessments to incident response.

Hyperproof Trial: Hyperproof is targeted at technical teams, compliance managers, and auditors considering new compliance programs or looking to make existing programs more efficient. Hyperproof makes it easy to manage all your day-to-day compliance tasks.

IncrediBuild Demo: Easily accelerate a Visual Studio sample with IncrediBuild or upload your code to gain exceptional build performance. This instance includes a pre-installed IncrediBuild Coordinator and Agent with Visual Studio Community and a Visual Studio sample project.

Infosys Analytics Workbench: Infosys Analytics Workbench provides leading capabilities for data discovery, analytical modeling, model management, visualization, and self-service model consumption to deliver end-to-end self-service capabilities.

Intellicus BI Server V18.1 (10 Users – Linux): Intellicus BI Server on Microsoft Azure is an end-to-end self-service BI platform that offers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, a semantic layer, and integrated ETL capabilities.

Intellicus BI Server V18.1 (5 Users – Linux): Intellicus BI Server on Microsoft Azure is an end-to-end self-service BI platform that offers advanced reporting and analytics capabilities, a semantic layer, and integrated ETL capabilities.

Johnson Controls Digital Vault: Johnson Controls Digital Vault is a flexible, scalable platform that reaches across silos to gather data from disparate sources, store it securely, and standardize it. It then converts that data into something you can leverage to gain new insights.

Kamstrup Analytics – District Analyser: Kamstrup’s analytics platform for water utilities comprises two systems – Water Intelligence and Incidents – to help you effectively go from imagining “What if” to knowing “How to.”

KEYRUS – Chatbot CODY – Smart Assistant Integrado: The CODY Smart Assistant solution with Microsoft LUIS offers an intelligent conversation platform that allows quick access to results and KPI placements for sales and operations. This application is available only in Portuguese.

Lenses.io: Lenses is an innovative DataOps platform providing SQL access and processing on streaming data. Lenses on Azure is optimized for both Azure HDInsight and your own Kafka clusters to streamline the configuration.

M365 Workplace Cloud Storage | Easy Intune Storage: Microsoft cloud-managed devices get relevant policies and configurations from Microsoft Intune, with some settings relying on files available by URL. This application manages these files with an easy, web-based approach.

Managed Detection and Response for Azure: Protect your Azure deployment with Paladion’s comprehensive Managed Detection and Response service that leverages next-generation AI to defend your Azure deployment at every stage of a threat’s lifecycle.

ManageEngine Mobile Device Manager Plus MSP: Mobile Device Manager Plus MSP is mobile device management software that features device enrollment, app management, profile management, security management, and more.

MinIO Client Container Image: MinIO Client is a Golang command line interface tool that offers alternatives for ls, cp, mkdir, diff, and rsync commands for file systems and object storage systems.

MinIO Container Image: MinIO is an object storage server that is compatible with cloud storage services and is mainly used for storing unstructured data such as photos, videos, and log files.

movingimage Secure Enterprise Video Platform: This Azure-based platform offers a smooth, secure video streaming experience for large companies across different verticals – including 26 of 30 DAX-listed companies.

OpenCities DigitalWorkplace Intranet: Empower your city employees with tools that elevate communication and collaboration. OpenCities DigitalWorkplace is a powerful cloud-based intranet that can streamline processes to save your city time and money.

OpenCities Web CMS: OpenCities makes it easier for cities to transform their websites into digital government platforms. OpenCities’ user-tested templates deliver beautiful and functional sites that allow staff to create content and online services that engage citizens.

OPSAI.COM: The OPSAI platform delivers deep insight into your IT estate, allowing IT and business users to have a common view of systems and processes. Ensure a secure, compliant IT infrastructure and automate your operations.

Phish Hunter: Phish Hunter offers an automated solution to phishing and identity compromise. The solution simplifies the process of detecting and remediating phishing incidents, eliminating the risk of compromised credentials.

Photographic Asset Inspection: Photographic Asset Inspection is for infrastructure owners responsible for maintaining and operating concrete surface infrastructure such as bridges.

PI3: PI3 is an Azure-based card payments analytics and reporting platform for financial institutions. The PI3 platform enables businesses connected to card transactions (credit or debit) to gain insights from their data.

PiXYZ Studio: PiXYZ Studio prepares and transforms 3D CAD data into 3D assets that are ready to use in real-time experiences for various business purposes, including design, marketing, and training.

Precision Campus Analytics: Precision Campus provides an online query tool and dashboard system for your college or university. Enable colleagues to explore enrollment, retention rates, course success rates, and other metrics you choose.

Publico24 sp. z o.o.: Publico24 is a digital press newsstand that offers news stories in HTML as a service that can help boost customer satisfaction. This application is available only in Polish.

PyTorch Container Image: PyTorch is a deep learning platform that accelerates the transition from research prototyping to production deployment. This Bitnami image includes Torchvision for specific computer vision support.

Real-World Audiences and Triggers for Dynamics: Neura enables you to attribute events such as session starts, app opens, push engagement attempts, and in-app features to real-world user behavior, uncovering actionable insights for campaign optimization.

Rhapsody Golf: Get comprehensive golf course management with Rhapsody Golf. The Front Office module handles bag drop, locker assignment, flight and caddy, and tournaments and scoring while the Membership module seamlessly handles privileges, statements, and renewals.

Rhapsody Hospitality Management System: The comprehensive Rhapsody Hospitality Management System handles financial consolidation, centralized purchasing, and group-level business intelligence while helping manage multiple properties.

RStudio Connect: Publish R and Python data products in one IT-managed and monitored location with flexible security policies to bring the power of data science to your enterprise.

SD-INTERNET: SD-INTERNET helps small and midsize enterprises accelerate their digital transformation journey by enhancing Azure cloud application experiences through Adaptiv Networks' high-performance Network-as-a-Service platform.

Service Sheeft: Developed on Microsoft technologies to be used as Software-as-a-Service on Azure, Service Sheeft is a ticketing system focused on improving communication and collaboration when solving end user support issues.

SmartCursors Marketplace: SmartCursors is a marketplace of integrated cloud applications for managing, driving, and transforming every aspect of business.

Smetric Business Intelligence Service: Smetric’s business intelligence tools automatically extract, analyze, and present data from various sources in beautiful, customized dashboards. The visual formats are easy to read, easy to share, and accessible from anywhere, anytime.

Solucion Neurona: Designed for financial institutions, Neurona works as a transactional switch specialized in managing electronic money transactions (mass payments, electronic collections, and funds transfers). This application is available only in Spanish.

SwaggerHub Cloud: Create a single source of truth for OpenAPI definitions with SwaggerHub's API design platform. Collaborate on changes and new development, define and enforce standards across your API catalog, and integrate seamlessly with other API lifecycle solutions.

SysTrack Digital Experience Monitoring: SysTrack is an experience monitoring solution that gathers data on what affects your users and their productivity in the digital workplace – including CPU, RAM, application resource use, and over 10,000 other data points.

Teradata Data Mover: Teradata Data Mover is a powerful data movement tool that intelligently chooses the fastest method to copy data and database objects between databases.

Teradata Data Mover (IntelliSphere): Teradata Data Mover is a powerful data movement tool that intelligently chooses the fastest method to copy data and database objects between databases.

Teradata Ecosystem Manager: Teradata Ecosystem Manager provides an end-to-end approach to meeting application SLAs through monitoring, administration, and control of data warehouse environments to let you more effectively manage your deployment.

Teradata Query Service: Teradata Query Service provides application developers a simplified, modern interface to connect to data from a web page or application.

Teradata QueryGrid Manager (IntelliSphere): Teradata QueryGrid Manager (IntelliSphere) provides federated query capability that allows users to access and query data in remote servers that are part of the Teradata QueryGrid data fabric.

Teradata Vantage with IntelliSphere: Teradata Vantage is Teradata's flagship analytics platform that provides a fast path to secure, scalable, high-performance analytics for tackling your most complex business challenges.

Teradata Viewpoint (IntelliSphere): Teradata Viewpoint (IntelliSphere) is an advanced web-based management portal for up to 10 Teradata systems whether in the cloud or on-premises. Entitlement comes from a paid Teradata Vantage with IntelliSphere subscription.

UiPath Robot: This solution template delivers provisioning of UiPath robots including automatic connection to your UiPath Orchestrator for secure scheduling, management, and control of your enterprise-wide digital workforce.

Unscrambl Answers: Unscrambl Answers has been trained with domain-specific knowledge about your business, understands your data, and has deeply embedded machine learning algorithms that help you discover and present relevant insights in natural language.

Voyado: The powerful, user-friendly Voyado loyalty system helps strengthen your customer relations and uses data to increase sales, cut costs, and reach maximum profitability.

VSBLTY VisionCaptor: The VisionCaptor content management system provides a wide variety of capabilities for bringing proximity-aware, interactive brand messaging to life on any digital screen or platform.

VULCAN: VULCAN analyzes your trainees’ performance in real time while they execute an exercise, providing you with the information needed to increase efficiency and flexibility.

WebFOCUS BUE 8201m: WebFOCUS BUE is for business users and analysts who would like to generate and share reports, charts, dashboards, and in-document analytics to conduct data discovery and explore data for trends, patterns, and opportunities.

Consulting services

Azure 4 Week Briefing, Assessment, and POC Offer: Pyramid Consulting Solutions offers an innovative Azure consulting service in three phases: on-site kickoff briefing, 30-day assessment, and proof of concept for migration of an initial workload to Azure.

Azure Backup & Restore: 4-Wk POC: Using Azure for backup and data protection presents an opportunity to address a number of risk and compliance objectives. Test-drive Azure Backup for four weeks and protect up to five workloads in Azure with this offer from Foundation IT.

Azure Cloud Assessment with Rackspace: 2-Wk: Rackspace consultants will assess your application estate and infrastructure platform to set a strategy for moving workloads to the cloud. They will also provide a report to determine a roadmap and high-level Azure design.

Azure Data Warehouse & Data Lake: 2-Hr Assessment: Neudesic will review your Azure logical data warehouse and Azure Data Lake requirements, then explain how a repeatable approach can deliver opportunities in predictive and prescriptive analytics in your environment.

Azure DevOps Jumpstart: 1-Week Implementation: Wintellect's one-week consulting offer jump-starts your dev-ops move to the cloud. Build, test, automate, and deploy applications more efficiently while reducing costs and increasing team productivity.

Azure Foundations Service: 10-day Implementation: Transparity Solutions will help you lead your Azure journey with governance and security. Learn how to architect key components such as networking integration, identity, network security, compute, and storage.

Azure Migration Planning Free 4 Hour Workshop: SystemsUp offers a free four-hour workshop to discuss whether your existing compute environment could be successfully migrated to Azure, resulting in a statement of work or proposal for work to deliver the engagement.

Azure Migration: 1-day Assessment: Atmosera offers a customer-proven assessment practice that ensures a match of your needs with the optimal cloud solution, delivering a clear roadmap with options to make informed decisions on Azure migration.

Azure Migration: 3-week Assessment: TCS offers a detailed, three-week cloud suitability assessment of up to 20 business applications along with associated infrastructure. An outcome report covers deployment model, cost benefit analysis, and migration plan.

Cloud Backup: 2-Day Assessment: Find out the ROI of moving to cloud backup and disaster recovery with this assessment by Insight, which compiles and clarifies the data you need to make well-informed decisions that will affect your organization’s operational resiliency.

CloudForte Consulting for Azure: Unisys CloudForte for Azure is a comprehensive and customizable managed services offering that addresses the most critical and trickiest cloud adoption challenges, especially around compliance and security.

CSP Migration: 2 Week Free Rapid Migration: Hanu Software offers a no-cost assessment and migration for existing Azure customers to Hanu's Cloud Service Provider (CSP). Hanu will provide a migration roadmap and recommendations on cost and performance optimizations.

CTA for Azure Migration: 2-Wk Assessment: This two-week datacenter-to-Azure migration assessment by Silicus is focused on helping enterprises with cloud adoption strategy, roadmap planning, current-state assessment, and solution gap analysis.

Datacom Enabling Services: 3-Wk Implementation: Standardize, automate, and securely deliver business-grade cloud applications with help from Datacom, an Azure Expert MSP. Customers benefit from the scale, security, and expert skillsets available via Datacom Enabling Services.

DevOps Practices and Platform: 1 Day Assessment: This professional dev-ops service from CloudOps supports current Azure users (or customers looking to get started with Azure) who care about speed to market and modernizing their applications and infrastructure practices.

Digital Media Assessment: 2-Hr Assessment: Globant will assess your digital media strategy and content delivery requirements and will provide a recommendation on how Azure can deliver your media to multiple endpoints for accelerated business impact.

Disaster Recovery trial in Azure: 4-Wk POC: This trial lets you test how Azure can protect workloads. Foundation IT will set up and test Azure Site Recovery on your behalf and simulate a DR test so that you have a complete view of how a managed cloud DR service works.

Domino & Notes App Modernization: 1-Day Workshop: This workshop from Binary Tree will detail the technical, business, and end user considerations and options available to pursue a Notes/Domino retirement or retention program.

DRaaS on Azure – 1 Week Assessment: Cloud4C, a Microsoft CSP Gold partner, can help assess and execute your disaster recovery plan. Azure-certified architects will create a roadmap to understand, define, and plan an optimal DR strategy for your organization.

Encrypted Briefcase: 1-Hour Briefing: Communication Square offers a briefing on best practices to implement its Encrypted Briefcase solution, which provides data protection, access tracking, and permissions revocation for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files.

Encrypted Briefcase: 1-Wk Assessment: This assessment from Communication Square analyzes your file storage and document collaboration platforms and then explains how to deploy Encrypted Briefcase to track file access, revoke permissions, and restore older data.

Encrypted Briefcase: 2 Weeks PoC: Communication Square offers this proof of concept for Encrypted Briefcase, which provides data protection for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files. Experts will set up, provision, and provide admin and onboarding guides for your solution.

Encrypted Briefcase: 4 Weeks Implementation: This four-week training by Communication Square leads to a deeper understanding and implementation of data protection provided by Encrypted Briefcase and delivers complimentary email support for one year.

Hybrid Identity and Access Management: 10-Wk Imp: Conterra will design a solution based on Microsoft Identity Manager (MIM) 2016 and Azure Active Directory and deploy it in your production environment either on-premises on via Azure IaaS.

Mobile App Innovation: 1hr Briefing: This one-hour mobile app innovation briefing from Dootrix shares best practices and helps you learn how to build a next-generation mobile app on the Azure cloud platform.

Running SCOM in Azure: 5 Day Assessment: The SCOM to Azure service assesses your System Center Operations Manager infrastructure and provides a framework to move it to Azure effectively and cost-efficiently.

SAP on Azure – 1 week Assessment: Cloud4C's SAP-certified consultants participate in a detailed assessment and workshop to define the best path for SAP migration and onboarding on Microsoft Azure.

Secure Communication System – 2 Week PoC: This Azure-based offering is designed to reimagine how your business approaches secure communication and compliance to industry-defined standards.

Secure Communication System: 1-Week Assessment: This assessment helps IT directors assess that their communication and collaboration are complaint, validate that access to data controls are in place and functioning properly, and confirm that company information is secure.

Secure Communication System – 1 Hour Briefing: Communication Square's Azure-based offering covers making, receiving, and transferring business calls in the office, at home, or on the road using your phone or PC without the need for a traditional phone system.

Secure Emailing System – 1-Hour Briefing: This briefing will address the following topics: How to protect your data no matter where it is, how to automatically classify sensitive information, and how to track and revoke access to emails and attachments.

Secure Emailing System – 2-Week Proof of Concept: This Azure-based offering is designed to reimagine how your business approaches securing email systems, compliance to industry-defined standards, and secure access to data.

Secure Emailing System: 1 Week Assessment: This assessment illustrates encryption and decryption methods, automatic data classification, protection against non-compliance, and how to combine the right set of tools, knowledge, and expertise to benefit your email security.

Secure Emailing System: 4 Wk Implementation: Communication Square's Azure-based offering helps classify your data based on sensitivity, protect your data, and leverage deployment and management flexibility.

Quelle: Azure

Microsoft makes it easier to build popular language representation model BERT at large scale

This post is co-authored by Rangan Majumder, Group Program Manager, Bing and Maxim Lukiyanovm, Principal Program Manager, Azure Machine Learning.

Today we are announcing the open sourcing of our recipe to pre-train BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) built by the Bing team, including code that works on Azure Machine Learning, so that customers can unlock the power of training custom versions of BERT-large models using their own data. This will enable developers and data scientists to build their own general-purpose language representation beyond BERT.

The area of natural language processing has seen an incredible amount of innovation over the past few years with one of the most recent being BERT. BERT, a language representation created by Google AI language research, made significant advancements in the ability to capture the intricacies of language and improved the state of the art for many natural language applications, such as text classification, extraction, and question answering. The creation of this new language representation enables developers and data scientists to use BERT as a stepping-stone to solve specialized language tasks and get much better results than when building natural language processing systems from scratch.

The broad applicability of BERT means that most developers and data scientists are able to use a pre-trained variant of BERT rather than building a new version from the ground up with new data. While this is a reasonable solution if the domain’s data is similar to the original model’s data, it will not deliver best-in-class accuracy when crossing over to a new problem space. For example, training a model for the analysis of medical notes requires a deep understanding of the medical domain, providing career recommendations depend on insights from a large corpus of text about jobs and candidates, and legal document processing requires training on legal domain data. In these cases, to maximize the accuracy of the Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms one needs to go beyond fine-tuning to pre-training the BERT model.

Additionally, to advance language representation beyond BERT’s accuracy, users will need to change the model architecture, training data, cost function, tasks, and optimization routines. All these changes need to be explored at large parameter and training data sizes. In the case of BERT-large, this can be quite substantial as it has 340 million parameters and trained over 2.5 billion Wikipedia and 800 million BookCorpus words. To support this with Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), the most common hardware used to train deep learning-based NLP models, machine learning engineers will need distributed training support to train these large models. However, due to the complexity and fragility of configuring these distributed environments, even expert tweaking can end up with inferior results from the trained models.

To address these issues, Microsoft is open sourcing a first of a kind, end-to-end recipe for training custom versions of BERT-large models on Azure. Overall this is a stable, predictable recipe that converges to a good optimum for developers and data scientists to try explorations on their own.

“Fine-tuning BERT was really helpful to improve the quality of various tasks important for Bing search relevance,” says Rangan Majumder, Group Program Manager at Bing, who led the open sourcing of this work.  “But there were some tasks where the underlying data was different from the original corpus BERT was pre-trained on, and we wanted to experiment with modifying the tasks and model architecture.  In order to enable these explorations, our team of scientists and researchers worked hard to solve how to pre-train BERT on GPUs. We could then build improved representations leading to significantly better accuracy on our internal tasks over BERT.  We are excited to open source the work we did at Bing to empower the community to replicate our experiences and extend it in new directions that meet their needs.”

“To get the training to converge to the same quality as the original BERT release on GPUs was non-trivial,” says Saurabh Tiwary, Applied Science Manager at Bing.  “To pre-train BERT we need massive computation and memory, which means we had to distribute the computation across multiple GPUs. However, doing that in a cost effective and efficient way with predictable behaviors in terms of convergence and quality of the final resulting model was quite challenging. We’re releasing the work that we did to simplify the distributed training process so others can benefit from our efforts.”

Results

To test the code, we trained BERT-large model on a standard dataset and reproduced the results of the original paper on a set of GLUE tasks, as shown in Table 1. To give you estimate of the compute required, in our case we ran training on Azure ML cluster of 8xND40_v2 nodes (64 NVidia V100 GPUs total) for 6 days to reach listed accuracy in the table. The actual numbers you will see will vary based on your dataset and your choice of BERT model checkpoint to use for the upstream tasks.

Table1. GLUE Test results, evaluated by the provided test script on the GLUE development set. The “Average” column is simple average over the table results. F1 scores are reported for QQP and MRPC, Spearman correlations are reported for STS-B, and accuracy scores are reported for the other tasks. The results for tasks with smaller dataset sizes have significant variation and may require multiple fine-tuning runs to reproduce the results.

The code is available in open source on the Azure Machine Learning BERT GitHub repo. Included in the repo is:

A PyTorch implementation of the BERT model from Hugging Face repo.
Raw and pre-processed English Wikipedia dataset.
Data preparation scripts.
Implementation of optimization techniques such as gradient accumulation and mixed precision.
An Azure Machine Learning service Jupyter notebook to launch pre-training of the model.
A set of pre-trained models that can be used in fine-tuning experiments.
Example code with a notebook to perform fine-tuning experiments.

With a simple “Run All” command, developers and data scientists can train their own BERT model using the provided Jupyter notebook in Azure Machine Learning service. The code, data, scripts, and tooling can also run in any other training environment.

Summary

We could not have achieved these results without leveraging the amazing work of the researchers before us, and we hope that the community can take our work and go even further. If you have any questions or feedback, please head over to our GitHub repo and let us know how we can make it better.

Learn how Azure Machine Learning can help you streamline the building, training, and deployment of machine learning models. Start free today.
Quelle: Azure

Assess the readiness of SQL Server data estates migrating to Azure SQL Database

Migrating hundreds of SQL Server instances and thousands of databases to Azure SQL Database, our Platform as a Service (PaaS) offering, is a considerable task, and to streamline the process as much as possible, you need to feel confident about your relative readiness for migration. Being able to identify low-hanging fruit including the servers and databases that are fully ready or that require minimal effort to prepare for migration eases and accelerates your efforts. We are pleased to share that Azure database target readiness recommendations have been enabled.

The Azure Migrate hub provides a unified view of all your migrations across the servers, applications, and databases. This integration provides customers with a seamless migration experience beginning during the discovery phase. The functionality allows customers to use assessment tools for visibility into the applications currently run on-premises so that they can determine cloud suitability and project the cost of running their applications in the cloud. It also allows customers to compare options between competing public and hybrid cloud options.

Assessing and viewing results

Assessing the overall readiness of your data estate for a migration to Azure SQL Database requires only a few steps:

Provision an instance of Azure Migrate, create a migration project, and then add Data Migration Assistant to the migration solution to perform the assessment.
After you create the migration project, download Data Migration Assistant and run an assessment against one or more SQL Server instances.
Upload the Data Migration Assistant assessment results to the Azure Migrate hub.

In a few minutes, the Azure SQL Database target readiness results will be available in your Azure Migrate project.

You can use single assessment for as many SQL Servers as you want, or you can run multiple parallel assessments and upload them to the Azure Migrate hub. The Azure Migrate hub consolidates all the assessments and a provide summarized view of SQL Server and database readiness.

The Azure Migrate dashboard provides a view of your data estate and its overall readiness for migration. This includes the number of databases that are ready to migrate to Azure SQL Database and to SQL Server hosted on an Azure virtual machine. Readiness is computed based on feature parity and schema compatibility with various Azure SQL Database offerings. The dashboard also provides insight into overall migration blockers and the all-up effort involved with migrating to Azure.

IT pros and database administrators can drill-down further to view a specific set of SQL Server instances and databases for a better understanding their readiness for migration.

The “Assessed database” view provides an overview of individual databases, showing info like migration blockers and readiness for Azure SQL Database and SQL Servers hosted on an Azure virtual machine.

Get started

Migrations can be overwhelming and a bit daunting, but we’re here with the expertise and tools, like Data Migration Assistant, to support you along the way. Discover your readiness results and acceleration your migration.

Get started:

Step-by-step guide on how to assess  your readiness
Perform a SQL Server migration assessment with Data Migration Assistant

Quelle: Azure

New capabilities in Stream Analytics reduce development time for big data apps

Azure Stream Analytics is a fully managed PaaS offering that enables real-time analytics and complex event processing on fast moving data streams. Thanks to zero-code integration with over 15 Azure services, developers and data engineers can easily build complex pipelines for hot-path analytics within a few minutes. Today, at Inspire, we are announcing various new innovations in Stream Analytics that help further reduce time to value for solutions that are powered by real-time insights. These are as follows:

Bringing the power of real-time insights to Azure Event Hubs customers

Today, we are announcing one-click integration with Event Hubs. Available as a public preview feature, this allows an Event Hubs customer to visualize incoming data and start to write a Stream Analytics query with one click from the Event Hub portal. Once the query is ready, they will be able to operationalize it in few clicks and start deriving real time insights. This will significantly reduce the time and cost to develop real-time analytics solutions.

One-click integration between Event Hubs and Azure Stream Analytics

Augmenting streaming data with SQL reference data support

Reference data is a static or slow changing dataset used to augment real-time data streams to deliver more contextual insights. An example scenario would be currency exchange rates regularly updated to reflect market trends, and then converting a stream of billing events in different currencies to a common currency of choice.

Now generally available (GA), this feature provides out-of-the-box support for Azure SQL Database as reference data input. This includes the ability to automatically refresh your reference dataset periodically. Also, to preserve the performance of your Stream Analytics job, we provide the option to fetch incremental changes from your Azure SQL Database by writing a delta query. Finally, Stream Analytics leverages versioning of reference data to augment streaming data with the reference data that was valid at the time the event was generated. This ensures repeatability of results.

New analytics functions for stream processing

Pattern matching:

With the new MATCH_RECOGNIZE function, you can easily define event patterns using regular expressions and aggregate methods to verify and extract values from the match. This enables you to easily express and run complex event processing (CEP) on your streams of data. For example, this function will enable users to easily author a query to detect “head and shoulder” patterns on the on a stock market feed.

Use of analytics function as aggregate:

You can now use aggregates such as SUM, COUNT, AVG, MIN, and MAX directly with the OVER clause, without having to define a window. Analytics functions as Aggregates enables users to easily express queries such as “Is the latest temperature greater than the maximum temperature reported in the last 24 hours?”

Egress to Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2

Azure Stream Analytics is a central component within the Big Data analytics pipelines of Azure customers. While Stream Analytics focuses on the real-time or hot-path analytics, services like Azure Data Lake help enable batch processing and advanced machine learning. Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 takes core capabilities from Azure Data Lake Storage Gen1 such as a Hadoop compatible file system, Azure Active Directory, and POSIX based ACLs and integrates them into Azure Blob Storage. This combination enables best in class analytics performance along with storage tiering and data lifecycle management capabilities and the fundamental availability, security, and durability capabilities of Azure Storage.

Azure Stream Analytics now offers native zero-code integration with Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 output (preview.)

Enhancements to blob output

Native support for Apache parquet format:

Native support for egress in Apache parquet format into Azure Blob Storage is now generally available. Parquet is a columnar format enabling efficient big data processing. By outputting data in parquet format into a blob store or a data lake, you can take advantage of Azure Stream Analytics to power large scale streaming extract, transfer, and load (ETL), to run batch processing, to train machine learning algorithms, or to run interactive queries on your historical data. We are now announcing general availability of this feature for egress to Azure Blob Storage.

Managed identities (formerly MSI) authentication:

Azure Stream Analytics now offers full support for Managed Identity based authentication with Azure Blob Storage on the output side. Customers can continue to use the connection string based authentication model. This feature is available as a public preview.

Many of these features just started rolling out worldwide and will be available in all regions within several weeks.

Feedback

The Azure Stream Analytics team is highly committed to listening to your feedback and letting the user voice influence our future investments. We welcome you to join the conversation and make your voice heard via our UserVoice page.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing proximity placement groups

Co-locate your Azure resources for improved application performance

The performance of your applications is central to the success of your IT organization. Application performance can directly impact your ability to increase customer satisfaction and ultimately grow your business.

Many factors can affect the performance of your applications. One of those is network latency which is impacted, among other things, by the physical distance between the virtual machines deployed.

For example, when you place your Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines in a single Azure region, the physical distance between the virtual machines is reduced. Placing them within a single availability zone is another step you can take to deploy your virtual machines closer to each other. However, as the Azure footprint grows, a single availability zone may span multiple physical data centers resulting in network latency that can impact your overall application performance. If a region does not support availability zones or if your application does not use availability zones, the latency between the application tiers may increase as a result.

Today, we are announcing the preview of proximity placement groups. A new capability that we are making available to achieve co-location of your Azure Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources and low network latency among them.

Azure proximity placement groups represent a new logical grouping capability for your Azure Virtual Machines, which in turn is used as a deployment constraint when selecting where to place your virtual machines. In fact, when you assign your virtual machines to a proximity placement group, the virtual machines are placed in the same data center, resulting in lower and deterministic latency for your applications.

When to use proximity placement groups

Proximity placement groups improve the overall application performance by reducing the network latency among virtual machines. You should consider using proximity placement groups for multi-tiered, IaaS-based deployments where application tiers are deployed using multiple virtual machines, availability sets and/or virtual machine scale sets.

As an example, consider the case where each tier in your application is deployed in an availability set or virtual machine scale set for high availability. Using a single proximity placement group for all the tiers of your applications, even if they use different virtual machine SKUs and sizes, will force all the deployments to follow each other and land in the same data center for best latency.

In order to get the best results with proximity placement groups, make sure you’re using accelerated networking and optimize your virtual machines for low latency.

Getting started with proximity placement groups

The easiest way to start with proximity placement groups is to use them with your Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates.

To create a proximity placement group resource just add the following statement:

{
"apiVersion": "2018-04-01",
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups",
"name": "[parameters('ppgName')]",
"location": "[resourceGroup().location]"
}

To use this proximity placement group later in the template with a virtual machine (or availability set or virtual machine scale set), just add the following dependency and property:

{
"name": "[parameters('virtualMachineName')]",
"type": "Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines",
"apiVersion": "2018-06-01",
"location": "[parameters('location')]",
"dependsOn": [
"[concat('Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups/', parameters('ppgName'))]"
],
"properties": {
"proximityPlacementGroup": {
"id": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Compute/proximityPlacementGroups',parameters('ppgName'))]"
}
}

To learn more about proximity placement groups, see the following tutorials on using proximity placement groups with PowerShell and CLI.

What to expect when using proximity placement groups

Proximity placement groups offer co-location in the same data center. However, because proximity placement groups represent an additional deployment constraint, allocation failures can occur (for example, you may not be able to place your Azure Virtual Machines in the same proximity placement group.)

When you ask for the first virtual machine in the proximity placement group, the data center is automatically selected. In some cases, a second request for a different virtual machine SKU may fail since it does not exist in the data center already selected. In this case, an OverconstrainedAllocationRequest error will be returned. To troubleshoot, please check to see which virtual machines are available in the chosen region or zone using the Azure portal or APIs. If all of the desired SKUs are available, try changing the order in which you deploy them.

In the case of elastic deployments, which scale out, having a proximity placement group constraint on your deployment may result in a failure to satisfy the request. When using proximity placement groups, we recommend that you ask for all the virtual machines at the same time.

Proximity placement groups are in preview now and are offered free of charge in all public regions.

Please refer to our documentation for additional information about proximity placement groups.

Here’s what we’ve heard from SAP, who participated in the early preview program:

“It is really great to see this feature now publicly available. We are going to make use of it in our standard deployments. My team is automating large scale deployments of SAP landscapes. To ensure best performance of the systems it is essential to ensure low-latency between the different components of the system. Especially critical is the communication between Application server and the database, as well as the latency between HANA VMs when synchronous replication has to be enabled. In the late 2018 we did some measurements in various Azure regions and found out that sometimes the latency was not as expected and not in the optimal range. While discussing this with Microsoft, we were offered to join the early preview and evaluate the Proximity Placement Groups (PPG) feature. During our evaluation we were able to bring down the latency to less than 0.3 ms between all system components, which is more than sufficient to ensure great system performance. Best deterministic results we achieved when PPGs were combined with Network acceleration of VM NICs, which additionally improved the measured latencies.”

Ventsislav Ivanov, Development Architect, SAP
Quelle: Azure

Enhancing the customer experience with the Azure Networking MSP partner program

We are always looking for ways to improve the customer experience and allow our partners to complement our offerings. In support of these efforts we are sharing the Azure Networking Managed Service Provider (MSP) program along with partners that deliver value added managed cloud network services to help enterprise customers connect, operationalize, and scale their mission critical applications running in Azure.

Azure Networking MSP Partner Program enables partners such as networking focused MSPs, network carriers, and systems integrators (SIs) to use their rich networking experience to offer cloud and hybrid networking services around Azure’s growing portfolio of Azure Networking products and services.

Azure’s Networking services are fundamental building blocks critical to cloud migration, optimal connectivity, and security of applications. New networking services such as Virtual WAN, ExpressRoute, Azure Firewall, and Azure Front Door further enrich this portfolio allowing customers to deploy richer applications in the cloud. The Networking MSP partners can help customers deploy and manage Azure Networking services.

Azure Networking MSPs

Azure MSPs play a critical role in enterprise cloud transformation by bringing their deep knowledge and real-world experience to help enterprise customers migrate to Azure. Azure MSPs and the Azure Expert MSP program make it easy for customers to discover and engage specialized MSPs.

Azure Networking MSPs are a specialized set of MSPs for addressing enterprise cloud networking needs and challenges across all aspects of cloud and hybrid networking. Their managed network services and offerings include various aspects of the application lifecycle including network architecture, planning, deployment, operations, maintenance, and optimization.

Azure Lighthouse – unblocking Azure Networking MSPs

Many enterprise customers, such as banks and financial institutions want partners who can help them with managing their Azure Networking subscriptions. However, the need for individual customer management for these subscriptions introduces a lot of manual work for these service providers.

Last week, we announced Azure Lighthouse, which is a unique set of capabilities on Azure, empowering service provider partners with a single control plane to view and manage Azure at scale across all their customers with higher automation and efficiency. We also talked about how Azure Lighthouse enables management at scale for service providers.

With Azure Lighthouse, Azure Networking MSPs can seamlessly onboard customers via managed services offers on the Azure marketplace or natively via ARM templates – empowering them to deliver a rich set of managed network experiences for their end-customers.

Azure Networking MSP partners

Azure Networking partners play a big role in the Azure networking ecosystem, delivering Virtual WAN CPEs and hybrid networking services such as ExpressRoute to enterprises that are building cloud infrastructures. We welcome the following Azure Networking MSP launch partners into our Azure Networking MSP partner ecosystem.

These partners have invested in people, best practices, operations and tools to build and harness deep Azure Networking knowledge and service capabilities. They’ve trained their staff on Azure and have partnered closely with us in Azure Networking through technical workshops and design reviews.

These partners are also early adopters of Azure Lighthouse, building and delivering a new generation of managed network experiences for their end customers. We encourage all worldwide networking MSPs, network carriers, and SIs that would like to join this program to reach out via ManagedVirtualWAN@microsoft.com to join the Azure Networking MSP program and bring your unique value and services to Azure customers.

In summary, we firmly believe that Azure customers will greatly benefit from the new cloud networking focused services our partners are bringing to the market. Customers will be able to leverage these services to augment their own inhouse skills and be able to move faster and more efficiently while optimally leveraging the cloud to meet their enterprise business needs. For more information on how to engage with our Networking MSP partner, please see partner information on our MSP partners site.
Quelle: Azure

Advancing Microsoft Azure reliability

Reliance on cloud services continues to grow for industries, organizations, and people around the world. So now more than ever it is important that you can trust that the cloud solutions you rely on are secure, compliant with global standards and local regulations, keep data private and protected, and are fundamentally reliable. At Microsoft, we are committed to providing a trusted set of cloud services, giving you the confidence to unlock the potential of the cloud.

Over the past 12 months, Azure has operated core compute services at 99.995 percent average uptime across our global cloud infrastructure. However, at the scale Azure operates, we recognize that uptime alone does not tell the full story. We experienced three unique and significant incidents that impacted customers during this time period, a datacenter outage in the South Central US region in September 2018, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) challenges in November 2018, and DNS maintenance issues in May 2019.

Building and operating a global cloud infrastructure of 54 regions made up of hundreds of evolving services is a large and complex task, so we treat each incident as an important learning moment. Outages and other service incidents are a challenge for all public cloud providers, and we continue to improve our understanding of the complex ways in which factors such as operational processes, architectural designs, hardware issues, software flaws, and human factors can align to cause service incidents. All three of the incidents mentioned were the result of multiple failures that only through intricate interactions led to a customer-impacting outage. In response, we are creating better ways to mitigate incidents through steps such as redundancies in our platform, quality assurance throughout our release pipeline, and automation in our processes. The capability of continuous, real-time improvement is one of the great advantages of cloud services, and while we will never eliminate all such risks, we are deeply focused on reducing both the frequency and the impact of service issues while being transparent with our customers, partners, and the broader industry.

Ensuring reliability is a fundamental responsibility for every Azure engineer. To augment these efforts, we have formed a new Quality Engineering team within my CTO office, working alongside our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team to pioneer new approaches to deliver an even more reliable platform. To keep improving our reliability, here are some of the initiatives that we already have underway:

Safe deployment practices – Azure approaches change automation through a safe deployment practice framework which aims to ensure that all code and configuration changes go through a cycle of specific stages. These stages include dev/test, staging, private previews, a hardware diversity pilot, and longer validation periods before a broader rollout to region pairs. This has dramatically reduced the risk that software changes will have negative impacts, and we are extending this mechanism to include software-defined infrastructure changes, such as networking and DNS.
Storage-account level failover – During the September 2018 datacenter outage, several storage stamps were physically damaged, requiring their immediate shut down. Because it is our policy to prioritize data retention over time-to-restore, we chose to endure a longer outage to ensure that we could restore all customer data successfully. A number of you have told us that you want more flexibility to make this decision for your own organizations, so we are empowering customers by previewing the ability to initiate your own failover at the storage-account level.
Expanding availability zones – Today, we have availability zones live in the 10 largest Azure regions, providing an additional reliability option for the majority of our customers. We are also underway to bring availability zones to the next 10 largest Azure regions between now and 2021.
Project Tardigrade – At Build last month, I discussed Project Tardigrade, a new Azure service named after the nearly indestructible microscopic animals also known as water bears. This effort will detect hardware failures or memory leaks that can lead to operating system crashes just before they occur, so that Azure can then freeze virtual machines for a few seconds so the workloads can be moved to a healthy host.  
Low to zero impactful maintenance – We’re investing in improving zero-impact and low-impact update technologies including hot patching, live migration, and in-place migration. We’ve deployed dozens of security and reliability patches to host infrastructure in the past year, many of which were implemented with no customer impact or downtime. We continue to invest in these technologies to bring their benefits to even more Azure services.
Fault injection and stress testing – Validating that systems will perform as designed in the face of failures is possible only by subjecting them to those failures. We’re increasingly fault injecting our services before they go to production, both at a small scale with service-specific load stress and failures, but also at regional and AZ scale with full region and AZ failure drills in our private canary regions. Our plan is to eventually make these fault injection services available to customers so that they can perform the same validation on their own applications and services.

Look for us to share more details of our internal architecture and operations in the future. While we are taking all of these steps to improve foundational reliability, Azure also provides you with high availability, disaster recovery, and backup solutions that can enable your applications to meet business availability requirements and recovery objectives. We maintain detailed guidance on designing reliable applications, including best practices for architectural design, monitoring application health, and responding to failures and disasters.

Reliability is and continues to be a core tenet of our trusted cloud commitments, alongside compliance, security, privacy, and transparency. Across all these areas, we know that customer trust is earned and must be maintained, not just by saying the right thing but by doing the right thing. Microsoft believes that a trusted, responsible and inclusive cloud is grounded in how we engage as a business, develop our technology, our advocacy and outreach, and how we are serving the communities in which we operate. Microsoft is committed to providing a trusted set of cloud services, giving you the confidence to unlock the potential of the cloud.
Quelle: Azure

Exploring the Micorosoft Healthcare Bot partner program

This post was co-authored by Hadas Bitran, Group Manager, Microsoft Healthcare Israel.

Every day, healthcare organizations are beginning their digital transformation journey with the Microsoft Healthcare Bot Service built on Azure. The Healthcare Bot service empowers healthcare organizations to build and deploy an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered, compliant, conversational healthcare experience at scale. The service combines built-in medical intelligence with natural language capabilities, extensibility tools, and compliance constructs, allowing healthcare organizations such as providers, payers, pharma, HMOs, and telehealth to give people access to trusted and relevant healthcare services and information.

Healthcare organizations can leverage the Healthcare Bot Service on their digital transformation journey today, as we announced in our blog Microsoft Healthcare Bot brings conversational AI to healthcare. That’s why we are so happy to share more information on the Healthcare Bot Service partner program. Our Healthcare Bot certified partners empower healthcare organizations to successfully deploy virtual assistants on the Microsoft Healthcare Bot service. Working with an official partner, healthcare organizations can achieve the full potential of the Microsoft Healthcare Bot by leveraging the expertise and experience of partners who understand the business needs and challenges in healthcare.

This new program is open to existing Microsoft partners that support organizations in the healthcare domain, and delivers the training and resources required to support customers with end to end solutions using Microsoft’s Healthcare Bot Service. The program is designed to support partner success and enable partners to provide tailored solutions using the Healthcare Bot service as a foundation.

With the power of the cloud and a platform that is uniquely built for healthcare conversational intelligence, partners can quickly demonstrate value and iterate on solutions for customers. Official partners have access to partner-only resources and benefits that will enable them to provide customers with differentiated and value-added offerings such as:

Partner listing in the Healthcare Bot partner directory.
Preferential messaging tiers.
Free demonstration and proof of concept Healthcare Bot Instances.
Direct support channel from the product team.
Partner resources including sales materials, product updates and release notes.

The Microsoft Healthcare Bot service helps partners bring conversational AI to innovative healthcare organizations. Partners can support healthcare organizations to deploy customized conversational experiences at scale, reducing costs and improving outcomes for their patients with virtual assistants built to complement their healthcare services.

The Healthcare Bot provides partners with a comprehensive platform to automate healthcare engagements and provides patients with instant access to the services they need. The service facilitates multi-channel healthcare conversations such as chat bots or handoff to live nurses over Microsoft Teams. Partners can build differentiated offerings and create unique conversational healthcare experiences that support the type of digital interaction required by the patient.

Next steps

Partners interested in certification should submit a request to HealthBotSupport@microsoft.com. Healthcare organizations seeking certified Healthcare Bot partners can find more information in the official partner directory.
Quelle: Azure

Introducing the new Azure Migrate: A hub for your migration needs

Moving on-premises apps and data to the cloud is a key step in our customers’ migration journey, and we’re committed to helping simplify that process. Earlier this year, we invited customers to participate in the preview of multiple new migration capabilities. Today, I am excited to announce the latest evolution of Azure Migrate, which provides a streamlined, comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft and partner tools to meet migration needs, all in one place.

With the general availability of Azure Migrate, including the new integrated partner experience, Server Assessment, Server Migration, Database Assessment, and Database Migration capabilities, we strive to make the cloud journey even easier for customers. Azure Migrate acts as a central hub for all migration needs and tools from infrastructure to applications to data. We are truly democratizing the migration process with guidance and choice.

New Azure Migrate integrated experience

The new experience provides you access to Microsoft and ISV tools and helps identify the right tool for your migration scenario. To help with large-scale datacenter migrations and cloud transformation projects, we’ve also added end-to-end progress tracking.

New features include:

Guided experience for the most common migration scenarios such as server and database migration, data movement to Azure with Data Box, and migration of applications to Azure App Service
Feature-based grouping and choice of Microsoft and partner tools for the typical phases of the migration process—discovery, assessment, and migration
An integrated experience that ensures continuity and gives you a consistent view of your datacenter assets

Carbonite, Cloudamize, Corent, Device42, Turbonomic, and UnifyCloud are already integrated with Azure Migrate. 

Powerful Server Assessment and Server Migration capabilities

With our new Azure Migrate: Server Assessment service offering, in addition to discovery and assessment of VMware servers, you will now be able to:

Perform large-scale VMware datacenter discovery and assessment for migration. Customers can now discover and assess 35,000 virtual machines (VMs). This is a tremendous scale improvement from the previous limit of 1,500 VMs.
Perform large-scale Hyper-V datacenter discovery and assessment for migration. Customers can now profile Hyper-V hosts with up to 10,000 VMs. You can also bring all your inventory from VMware and Hyper-V in the same Azure Migrate project.
Get performance-based rightsizing, application dependency analysis, migration cost planning, and readiness analysis for both VMware and Hyper-V. You don’t need any agents to perform discovery and assessment with Server Assessment.

Azure Migrate: Server Assessment is free to all Azure customers and will soon add support for physical server discovery and assessment.

Building on our current ability to perform migration of VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) virtual machines and physical servers to Azure, the new Azure Migrate: Server Migration enables:

Agentless migration of VMware VMs to Azure in preview. When you opt to use the new agentless migration method for VMware VMs, you can use the same appliance for discovery, assessment, and migration. Onboard once and execute the entire process seamlessly. You also get OS-agnostic support to help you migrate any client or server OS, including Windows or Linux, that is supported on the Azure platform. This complements the generally available agent-based migration capability.
Agentless migration of Hyper-V VMs to Azure and agent-based migration of physical servers and VMs running on Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform to Azure.
Simplified experience, similar to creating a virtual machine in Azure. The assessment recommendations automatically get applied to the VMs as you start migrating them, especially the rightsizing recommendations that help you optimize servers and save money. This feature works with assessments performed by Azure Migrate: Server Assessment or any integrated partners, such as Cloudamize and Turbonomic.
No-impact migration testing that helps you plan your migration with confidence. You also get zero data loss when you move your applications to Azure.

Azure Migrate: Server Migration is free to all Azure customers. You only pay for the compute and storage that you consume in your Azure subscription.

Geographic availability

The Azure Migrate experience, including Server Assessment, Server Migration, and our integrated set of Microsoft and partner tools, are available starting today in United States, Europe, Asia, and the United Kingdom. You can start by creating an Azure Migrate project in a geography of your choice. We will ensure that metadata associated with your Microsoft and partner scenarios is retained in an Azure datacenter in the geography that you select. Later this month, customers will be able to create their Azure Migrate projects in Australia, Canada, and Japan. You can use a project in any geography to perform migrations to any Azure region of your choice.

You can see the new Azure Migrate, Server Assessment, and Server Migration in action in the videos below.

How to get started with Azure Migrate
How to discover, assess, and migrate VMware VMs to Azure
How to discover, assess, and migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure

We are innovating faster than ever before so that you can experience the modern capabilities in Azure. Get started with Azure Migrate.
Quelle: Azure