Microsoft Azure News, Entwicklungen, Updates, HowTos - Seite 189 von 255

The IT industry is excited about the general availability of Windows Server 2016 with enhancements to Active Directory, Hyper-V failover clustering, remote desktop services, and file and storage services. Windows Server 2016 is being widely run on physical as well as virtual environments such as Hyper-V and VMware VM and is used for hosting server applications such as SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint. Protecting these workloads is amongst the top priorities for IT admins managing their datacenters.

Azure Backup has evolved into a first-class platform-as-a service (PaaS) in Microsoft Azure that integrates with the on-premises enterprise class backup products, System Center Data Protection Manager (DPM), and Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) to provide a seamless Hybrid cloud backup solution. With its cloud first enterprise backup architecture, Azure Backup enables IT admins to be essentially free from infrastructure management tasks such as provisioning infrastructure for backup needs, security, and maintenance. Also, with Windows Server’s native backup solution, Windows Server Backup, you can backup system state and do bare metal recovery of Windows Server 2016 to local disk as well.

Whether you are running Windows Server 2016 on premises or in Azure and want to protect your files and folders, private cloud deployments, or server applications, we provide a comprehensive strategy for all your Windows Server 2016 deployments.

Backup Windows Server 2016 to local disk

With Windows Server Backup, you can backup a full server (all volumes or selected volumes), system state to local disk, and do a bare metal recovery to local disk in case of any disaster.

Backup Azure IaaS VMs running Windows Server 2016

If you are running Windows Server 2016 on Azure IaaS VMs, you can protect the VMs with the native IaaS VM backup. You get an application-consistent backup of Azure IaaS VMs, with no hassles of licensing backup software and provisioning compute and storage infrastructure, and with the ease of instantly restoring individual files and folders on the Azure IaaS VMs.

Backup files and folders on Windows Server 2016 directly to Azure

You can backup files and folders running on Windows Server 2016 with Microsoft Azure Backup, which provides seamless backup to the cloud without the hassles of having backup infrastructure. Also, with Azure Backup’s enhanced security features, you can protect your backed up data against security threats like ransomware.

Backup Private Cloud Deployments and server applications running on Windows Server 2016

If you are running private cloud deployments, such as Hyper-V and VMware VMs, or server applications like SQL, Exchange, SharePoint on Windows Server 2016, you can back them up to local disk and to Azure using Microsoft Azure Backup Server and System Center Data Protection Manager 2016.

Start exploring Windows Server 2016 and Azure Backup now to tailor the solution for your needs.

Azure Managed Applications

We are excited to announce the public preview of Azure Managed Applications in Azure Marketplace.

Azure Managed Applications provides an ecosystem that enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and corporate central IT teams to deliver turnkey solutions through the Azure Marketplace or Service Catalog. Although customers deploy these managed applications in their subscriptions, they don’t have to maintain, update, or service them as a key advantage of this service. The vendors will manage and support these applications. This means that the customers don’t have to invest in building the application specific domain knowledge, which would have been needed to service these applications. It enables customers to automatically acquire application updates without having to worry about troubleshooting and diagnosing issues with the application.

On the other side, it creates a channel to not only sell infrastructure and software through the marketplace, but also a way to attach services and operational support to Azure customers. It enables vendors to bill customers using Azure's billing system and use templates to manage the lifecycle of deployed applications. These are self-contained and sealed to the customer, allowing the vendors to provide a higher quality of service. Such an ecosystem in Azure not only benefits the PaaS and SaaS vendors, but also corporate central platform teams and System Integrators that wish to package and resell their solutions.

Azure Managed Applications comes in two flavors. One is called Service Catalog Managed Applications and the other is called Azure Marketplace Managed Applications.

Service Catalog

Service Catalog allows organizations to create a catalog of approved solutions for Azure. Maintaining such a catalog of solutions is helpful specially for central IT teams in enterprises as it enables them to ensure compliance with certain organizational standards while providing great solutions for their organization. They can control, update, and maintain these applications. It allows employees in the organization to easily discover the rich set of applications that are recommended and approved by the IT department. The customers will only see the Service Catalog Managed Applications created by themselves or those that have been shared with them by other people in the organization. The publisher can create these Service Catalog Managed Applications using Azure CLI. Customers can consume/create the published managed applications from the Azure portal today. However, the support for publishing Service Catalog Managed Applications is coming to the Azure portal soon!

Learn more about how to publish and consume Service Catalog Managed Applications.

Marketplace

The other option is the Azure Marketplace Managed Applications. These applications are available in the marketplace on the Azure portal. Once published by the vendor, these are available for everyone inside or outside of your organization to consume. This enables MSPs, ISVs, and System Integrators (SI’s) to offer their solutions to all Azure customers. The customers get the benefit of leveraging such complex solutions without having to gain a deep understanding and invest in maintaining these. At the time of publishing, the publisher gets the option of making their offer available as a Managed Application or as a Solution template which is the unmanaged equivalent.

The vendors can publish the Managed Applications to Azure Marketplace using the Cloud Partner Portal. The main components of publishing a managed application includes the template files, which describe the resources that will be provisioned, and the UI definition file, which describes how the required inputs for provisioning these resources will be displayed in the portal. The required files are packaged in a .zip file and uploaded through the publishing portal. Pleas note that the “SKU Type” property differentiates a Solution template from a Managed Application. Below is a image of the publishing portal.

Once the offer is published, it goes through some pre-requisite checks, validations, and other reviews. After all checks have passed, the offer goes live and is made available for public consumption. Learn more and get detailed instructions on how to publish a marketplace managed application.

After the offer goes live, it is visible in the Azure Marketplace and the customers can create an instance of the offer.

Authorizations

As mentioned above, the vendor manages the application which is provisioned by the customer. To enable the vendor to successfully manage the application, the vendor requires certain permissions to the resource group in the customer subscription where these resources will be provisioned. At the time of publishing the managed application, the vendor indicates the Azure AD user, user group, or application which will have certain permissions on the resource group. This is where the resources required by the managed application will be deployed. The permissions granted will typically be one of the Azure RBAC built-in roles.

It was also stated above that the managed applications are self-contained and sealed for the customer. This means that the resource group where the resources will be provisioned are “locked” for the customer. As a result, customers cannot delete or make changes to the resources in this resource group.

Summary

To recap, below is a quick summary explaining the key differences between the two flavors of Managed Applications.

Service Catalog Managed Application

Marketplace Managed Application

Publishing Tool

Azure CLI
Azure Portal (coming soon)
Azure PowerShell (coming soon)

Publishing portal

Artifacts Needed

mainTemplate.json
applianceMainTemplate.json
applianceCreateUIDefinition.json

Use Cases/Advantages

Deliver approved apps/services to developers and business units within the organization.

Central IT will provide management.

Gets a managed application on Azure, while ensuring governance.

Abstract the end users from any underlying complexity of Azure resources.

Capable of monetizing expertise and company-specific IP for the solution.
Get cost/time-to-market benefits by using managed applications vs. hiring/building specific talent on the team.
Direct customer contact and understanding of usage patterns with ability to drive innovation in its own product.
Vendors can use Azure billing system to bill their customers.

Additional resources

Publish a Marketplace Managed Application
Publish a Service Catalog Managed Application
How to create UIDefinition for the Managed Application
Managed Applications samples GitHub repository

Quelle: Azure

11. Juli 2017

da Agency

Linux and Windows networking performance enhancements | Accelerated Networking

Microsoft Azure is pleased to announce a series of performance optimizations supporting the latest distributions of Linux (Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS) and Windows for all virtual machine (VM) sizes, providing up to 25 Gbps of networking throughput. 25Gbps bandwidth is currently the fastest published speed between VMs in the public cloud.

These optimizations have been deployed to the entire Azure computing fleet in coordination with the latest Linux operating systems being published to the Azure Marketplace. Other popular Linux operating systems plan to incorporate these optimizations through their regular updates.

In order to help our customers architect high performance solutions, Azure is also publishing the expected network performance for VMs on our website. This will make it easier for our customers to reduce solution costs while maintaining optimal performance. See expected network performance per VM size for further information.

Some examples of today's expected performance metrics are highlighted below:

VM Size

vCPU
Memory: GB
Local SSD: GB
Max data disks
Max cached and local disk throughput: IOPS / MBps (cache size in GB)
Max uncached disk throughput: IOPS / MBps
Max NICs / Expected network performance: Mbps

Standard_M64ms
64
1792
2048
32
80,000 / 800 (6348)
40,000 / 1,000
32 / 16000

Standard_GS5

32
448
896
64
160,000 / 1,600 (4,224)
80,000 / 2,000
8 / 20000

Standard_
DS15_v2

20
140
280
40
80,000 / 640 (720)
64,000 / 960
8 / 20000

Standard_ 128
M128s

128
2048
4096
64
160,000 / 1,600 (12,696)
80,000 / 2,000
32 / 25000

Maximize your VM’s Performance with Accelerated Networking (AN) – now widely available for 8+ core virtual machines

We are also pleased to announce the General Availability (GA) of Accelerated Networking (AN) for Windows with an expanded Public Preview for Linux.

AN provides very low latency and jitter networking performance via Azure's in-house programmable hardware and technologies such as SR-IOV. Also, by moving much of the SDN stack into hardware, compute cycles are reclaimed by end user applications putting less load on the VM.

As an example of AN’s performance advantage, a growing number of Azure SQL services in production today have achieved an amazing 70% improvement in several benchmarks. This clearly demonstrates real world performance benefits for customers looking to run latency sensitive workloads in the cloud.

AN for Linux continues its Public Preview and is supported by the latest operating systems published in the Azure Marketplace (Ubuntu, Red Hat, CentOS, and SLES). This preview is quickly expanding to more regions over the coming weeks. Additional operating systems such as FreeBSD will be supported with updates coming soon.

Instructions on how to sign up and participate in Azure's AN Linux Public Preview are found here, Accelerated Networking Overview and Deployment Instructions, and are supplemented by a list of current limitations found here, Accelerated Networking Service Update.

Expected network performance is the maximum aggregated bandwidth allocated per VM size across all NICs for all destinations. Upper limits are not guaranteed, but are intended to provide guidance for selecting the right VM size for a specific application. Actual network performance will depend on a variety of factors including number of TCP connections, network congestion, application workloads, and network settings. For more information on optimizing network throughput, see Optimizing Network Throughput for Linux and Windows. To achieve network performance on Linux or Windows VMs, it may be necessary to select specific Azure recommended versions. To produce comparable results see How to Reliably Test for Virtual Machine Network Performance.
Quelle: Azure

10. Juli 2017

da Agency

Accelerate websites with Azure CDN using Dynamic Site Acceleration

Users expect fast, reliable, and personalized web experiences independent of their browser, location, device, or network. However, the very innovations, such as rich interactive content and applications, that make these experiences so engaging also slow page downloads and put the quality of the consumer experience at risk. Standard CDN capability includes the ability to cache files closer to the end users to speed up delivery of static files. However, this does not help to improve the loading speed of dynamic web applications and APIs, which return unique data to each user along with request that cannot be cached. With Azure CDN Dynamic Site Acceleration (DSA), the performance of web pages with dynamic content is significantly improved.

DSA includes a variety of techniques that benefit the latency and performance of dynamic content.

Route / network optimizations: The fastest and most reliable path to your origin to retrieve and deliver dynamic content is constantly evaluated. Content is delivered using optimized network protocols and by using the optimal network delivery path to ensure Internet congestion points and unnecessarily long routes are avoided.

TCP optimization: Internet communications over TCP are not optimized for performance. With DSA, a number of TCP optimizations are applied to improve the performance of the delivery, such as keeping connections open longer and reusing them for additional requests. These optimizations accelerate connection setup, increase the packet transmission rate, and reduce packet loss.

Resource prefetching (Akamai only): Based on user behavior and access patterns, the CDN learns which assets are required by the application and preemptively fetches content from origin and brings it closer to the user so it can be delivered faster.

Adaptive Image Compression (Akamai only): Continuously monitor internet conditions to identify slower network connections, to automaticaly compress and resize JPEG images to deliver the most optimal image based on connection speed.

To learn how to use this feature and for more details, please visit the documentation page.

DSA is available today as an optimization on top of an Azure CDN from Akamai. This feature will be coming to Verizon standard and premium profiles in the near future. Note that there are additional fees associated with the DSA optimization type, unlike the media and large file optimization types which are available without additional cost.
Quelle: Azure

10. Juli 2017

da Agency

Azure SQL Data Warehouse previews 3x compute scale with unlimited columnar storage

Our goal when we launched Azure SQL Data Warehouse was to create a SQL-based, fully managed, petabyte-scale cloud data warehouse that would serve as the platform for analytics at massive scale. By separating compute from the storage customers have been empowered to also create highly elastic solutions. Elastic scale enables customers to provision in minutes, scale in seconds and pause or resume the service on demand affording complete control of compute consumption.

Today we are making an exciting announcement. Azure SQL Data Warehouse is increasing its compute scale threefold; raising the compute scale from 6,000 DWU to 18,000 DWU so that customers can run their most compute intensive data warehouse workloads in the cloud. Azure SQL Data Warehouse will also support unlimited columnar storage at these new performance levels.

Companies including Toshiba, MediaBrix and Integral Analytics have all embraced the separation of compute and storage pioneered by Azure SQL Data Warehouse to deliver simple, highly elastic and scalable analytical solutions in the cloud.

It is now almost twelve months to the day since Azure SQL Data Warehouse has been available in Azure. What an incredible year it has been! The service is in thirty regions worldwide, making it the most broadly available cloud data warehouse in the world with almost twice the regional coverage of any other cloud data warehouse service; empowering companies to drive new analytical insights from their data wherever and whenever they need to do so.

With this preview, customers can scale their data warehouse workloads in Azure to new heights; driving answers to the most demanding analytical questions using our fully featured, enterprise class, SQL engine. Unlimited columnar storage is also important, as the diversity, variety and volume of customer data continues to grow at exponential rates. With PolyBase automatically scaling with the system, no additional work is required to take advantage of all the additional computing horsepower that is now available. These features make it even easier for customers to curate and serve the vast quantities of data being amassed in their cloud infrastructure with Azure SQL Data Warehouse.

As with all our compute performance levels, these new scale options also come with the flexibility that Azure SQL Data Warehouse provides by default; securely separating compute and storage, elastically managing compute with pause & resume and providing full enterprise integration giving you the audit and compliance requirements you need at every level of scale. Whether you require federated authentication, transparent data encryption, PCI DSS, HIPAA, SOC 1, SOC 2 or SOC 3 compliance Azure SQL Data Warehouse has you covered.

In the last year, we have also been actively engaging with many of our customers. Their feedback has helped to shape our improvements and this service update. Our customers have advocated for even greater compute power and agility from Azure SQL Data Warehouse. We see this inside Microsoft as well. Customers aren’t just wondering about petabyte scale. They are living in the petabyte world and thinking about solutions many times larger than that. Our customers, especially those at DW3000 and DW6000, have therefore been keen to know what is next in terms of compute and storage scale from the service.

“Our mission is to become the world’s No.1 online fashion destination for 20-somethings,” said Bob Strudwick, Chief Technology Officer of ASOS.com. “The scalability and performance provided by Azure SQL Data Warehouse supports our enterprise analytics platform and drives new insights for ASOS right across the business, helping us to deliver the best customer experience we can.”

Later this month, customers will be able to provision new preview instances of Azure SQL Data Warehouse at DW9000 and DW18000 through the Azure portal. Users will be able to scale with more compute capacity than ever before to drive their analytical workloads using our fully featured SQL engine. With unlimited columnar storage, customers will be free to use these new high scale performance levels to analyze unbounded volumes of data.

This is an exciting milestone in our vision for Azure SQL Data Warehouse. The customer success we have witnessed in one year has been incredibly energizing for the team. As we move into year two, we will continue to execute on our vision for Azure SQL Data Warehouse: building the largest and fastest cloud data warehouse in the world.

I encourage you to start using Azure SQL Data Warehouse. You can also sign up for the preview directly in the Azure portal. We look forward to welcoming you onto the service.
Quelle: Azure

10. Juli 2017

da Agency

Inspire 2017: New cloud services for partners to enable digital transformation

Today at Microsoft Inspire, more than 17,000 partners join us in Washington, D.C. to spend the week learning and sharing new ways to grow their business and help our mutual customers. Our customers look to Microsoft’s partner community to help them successfully navigate technology options and deliver cloud-based solutions that enable their digital transformation.

Today, I’m pleased to make several announcements that put Microsoft's innovation and global reach to work for our partners – and customers – in ways no other cloud vendor does.

Growing partner opportunities with the Microsoft Cloud

Last year we initiated a Microsoft Azure co-sell program to provide comprehensive sales and marketing support for partners building solutions with Azure. This new program was a first of its kind in the industry that aligned Microsoft’s large, global, salesforce behind partners. In just the first six months, this program helped close over $1 billion in annual contract value for Azure partners, created $6 billion in Azure partner pipeline opportunity, and generated more than 4,500 partner deals.

Azure is the only global, public cloud providing partners with this significant benefit through which Microsoft sales reps are paid up to 10% of the partner’s annual contract value when they co-sell qualified Azure-based partner solutions. This means Microsoft sales reps are specifically compensated to help Azure partners to drive new business and it gives partners have access to the global Microsoft sales force to grow their business.

To further the Azure co-sell program impact, we are making additional investments over the next 12 months. And, we are creating additional dedicated Channel Manager roles in Microsoft to supporting partners go to market efforts, helping their solutions reach new customers and integrating with our co-sell motion. Together these investments represent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in new co-sell incentives and support to help our partners grow their business.

We are also making it easier for partners to modernize their customers’ existing business applications, and build new ones, with a new program we are calling ISV Cloud Embed. With this new program, partners can purchase Dynamics 365, Power BI, Power Apps and Microsoft Flow as embeddable “building blocks” at discounts of up to 50%. In the same way partners build apps on Azure, they can now use these business applications capabilities to quickly add sales automation, service line and operational backend functionality to their own solutions. This reduces development time and costs by putting Microsoft engineering resources to work for them. Partners receive go-to-market support and an opportunity to reach 100 million commercial active users of Office 365 and a growing community of Dynamic 365 customers through Microsoft AppSource.

Lastly, we’re introducing the preview of Azure Managed Applications. Azure Managed Applications enables partners to deliver managed solutions through the Azure Marketplace. It serves as a channel not only to sell infrastructure and/or software through the marketplace, but also a way for partners to attach services and operational support to Azure customers. Managed applications streamline acquisition and deployment for customers, while outsourcing the management and operations of the solution to the partner.

From building on Azure, to industry leading co-sell support and new embeddable business application services, only Microsoft provides this comprehensive approach to assist partners in accelerating their business growth.

Azure Stack now ready to order via Hardware Partners

Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, offering a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform from Azure datacenters all the way to edge locations such as mine shafts, factory floors or cruise ships. Together with Dell EMC, HPE and Lenovo, we are announcing Microsoft Azure Stack integrated systems are now available to order. We have delivered Azure Stack software to our hardware partners, enabling us to begin the certification process for their integrated systems, with the first systems to begin shipping in September. Customers like Saxo Bank and Mitsui are integrating Azure Stack into their strategy to build modern applications across cloud and on-premises.

Additional news

To enable rapid innovation of data-centric applications, we’re announcing a 3x increase in compute scaling power of Azure SQL Data Warehouse, from 6,000 DWU to 18,000 DWU. As all companies become digital companies, the need for petabyte scale storage is increasing. At this scale, storing and querying data can be a massive undertaking, and becomes more complex as companies increasingly adopt AI. By separating compute from storage, it maximizes performance, creating a data warehouse built for the most advanced mobile, IoT and AI solutions. With this expanded offering, our partners and customers can deliver petabyte scale storage and querying.

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), puts new compliance requirements on customers. In addition to the resources already available on the Microsoft Trust Center, we just released two new GDPR assessment tools. An interactive GDPR assessment tool is available to any business or organization that wants to assess their current state of GDPR readiness. We also released a detailed assessment tool, available through our extensive partner network, that provides customers with actionable guidance and detailed recommendations of Microsoft products that may support their path to GDPR compliance.

To learn more about today’s Inspire announcements – including Microsoft 365, a new set of commercial offerings – take a moment to read Judson Althoff’s Official Microsoft Blog.
Quelle: Azure

10. Juli 2017

da Agency

Microsoft Azure Stack is ready to order now

Throughout the Technical Previews, we’ve seen tremendous customer and partner excitement around Microsoft Azure Stack. In fact, we’re speaking with thousands of partners this week at our Microsoft Inspire event. Our partners are excited about the new business opportunities opened up by our ‘One Azure Ecosystem’ approach, which helps them extend their Azure investments to Azure Stack, to unlock new possibilities for hybrid cloud environments. In that vein, today we are announcing:

Orderable Azure Stack integrated systems: We have delivered Azure Stack software to our hardware partners, enabling us to begin the certification process for their integrated systems, with the first systems to begin shipping in September. You can now order integrated systems from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo.
Azure Stack software pricing and availability: We have released pricing for the pay-as-you-use and capacity-based models today, you can use that information to plan your purchases.
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) availability: ASDK, the free single-server deployment option for trial purposes, is available for web download today. You can use it to build and validate your applications for integrated systems deployments.

Azure Stack promise

Azure Stack is an extension of Azure, thereby enabling a truly consistent hybrid cloud platform. Consistency removes hybrid cloud complexity, which helps you maximize your investments across cloud and on-premises environments. Consistency enables you to build and deploy applications using the exact same approach – same APIs, same DevOps tools, same portal – leading to increased developer productivity. Consistency enables you to develop cloud applications faster by building on Azure Marketplace application components. Consistency enables you to confidently invest in people and processes knowing that those are fully transferable. The ability to run consistent Azure services on-premises gets you full flexibility to decide where applications and workloads should reside. An integrated systems-based delivery model ensures that you can focus on what matters to your business (i.e., your applications), while also enabling us to deliver Azure innovation to you faster.

In its initial release, Azure Stack includes a core set of Azure services, DevOps tooling, and Azure Marketplace content, all of which are delivered through an integrated systems approach. Check out this whitepaper for more information about what capabilities are available in Azure Stack at the initial release and what is planned for future versions.

Hybrid use cases unlock application innovation

Azure and Azure Stack unlock new use cases for customer facing and internal line of business applications:

Edge and disconnected solutions: You can address latency and connectivity requirements by processing data locally in Azure Stack and then aggregating in Azure for further analytics, with common application logic across both. We’re seeing lots of interest in this Edge scenario across different contexts, including factory floor, cruise ships, and mine shafts.
Cloud applications that meet varied regulations: You can develop and deploy applications in Azure, with full flexibility to deploy on-premises on Azure Stack to meet regulatory or policy requirements, with no code changes needed. Many customers are looking to deploy different instances of the same application – for example, a global audit or financial reporting app – to Azure or Azure Stack, based on business and technical requirements. While Azure meets most requirements, Azure Stack enables on-premises deployments in locations where it’s needed. Saxo Bank is a great example of an organization who plan to leverage the deployment flexibility enabled by Azure Stack.
Cloud application model on-premises: You can use Azure web and mobile services, containers, serverless, and microservice architectures to update and extend existing applications or build new ones. You can use consistent DevOps processes across Azure in the cloud and Azure Stack on-premises. We’re seeing broad interest in application modernization, including for core mission-critical applications. Mitsui is a great example of an organization planning their application modernization roadmap using Azure Stack and Azure.

Ecosystem solutions across Azure and Azure Stack

You can speed up your Azure Stack initiatives by leveraging the rich Azure ecosystem:

Our goal is to ensure that most ISV applications and services that are certified for Azure will work on Azure Stack. Multiple ISVs, including Bitnami, Docker, Kemp Technologies, Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and SUSE Linux, are working to make their solutions available on Azure Stack.
You have the option of having Azure Stack delivered and operated as a fully managed service. Multiple partners, including Avanade, Daisy, Evry, Rackspace, and Tieto, are working to deliver managed service offerings across Azure and Azure Stack. These partners have been delivering managed services for Azure via the Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program and are now extending their offerings to include hybrid solutions.
Systems Integrators (SI) can help you accelerate your application modernization initiatives by bringing in-depth Azure skillsets, domain and industry knowledge, and process expertise (e.g., DevOps). PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC) is a great example of an SI that’s expanding their consulting practice to Azure and Azure Stack.

Orderable integrated systems, free single-server kit for trial

Azure Stack has two deployment options:

Azure Stack integrated systems – These are multi-server systems meant for production use, and are designed to get you up and running quickly. Depending upon your hardware preferences, you can choose integrated systems from Dell EMC, HPE, and Lenovo (with Cisco and Huawei following later). You can now explore these certified hardware solutions and order integrated systems by contacting our hardware partners. These systems come ready to run and offer consistent, end-to-end customer support no matter who you call. They will initially be available in 46 countries covering key markets across the world.
Azure Stack Development Kit (ASDK) – ASDK is a free single server deployment that’s designed for trial and proof of concept purposes. ASDK is available for web download today, and you can use it to prototype your applications. The portal, Azure services, DevOps tools, and Marketplace content are the same across this ASDK release and integrated systems, so applications built against the ASDK will work when deployed to a multi-server system.

Closing thoughts

As an extension of Azure, Azure Stack will deliver continuous innovation with frequent updates following the initial release. These updates will help us deliver enriched hybrid application use cases, as well as grow the infrastructure footprint of Azure Stack. We will also continue to broaden the Azure ecosystem to enable additional choice and flexibility for you.

I look forward to hearing what everyone does with Azure Stack!

– Mike
Quelle: Azure

7. Juli 2017

da Agency

Announcing Azure Service Health preview

Personalized guidance and support when issues in Azure services affect you.

We are excited to announce the preview of Azure Service Health, your new personalized service health dashboard in the Azure portal. It provides guidance and support when issues in Azure services affect you. Azure Service Health also helps you prepare for upcoming changes and maintenance scheduled for your Azure resources.

Watch this short video and continue reading to walk through the new Azure Service Health experience.

It’s easy to get started. Simply select the Service Health tile to launch your new Service Health dashboard.

The service issues view shows any ongoing issues in Azure services that are impacting your resources. Quickly understand when the issue began, and what services and regions are impacted.

Get the most recent update to understand what Azure is doing to resolve the issue. Get a link for the issue to use in your problem management system. Also, download a PDF summary of the issue to share with people who don’t have access to the Azure portal.

Review the list of your resources that might be impacted by this issue in the potential impact tab. Use the export action to download the list and share with your team.

Focus on what’s important. Filter Service Health to your business-critical subscriptions, regions, and resource types. Save the filter and pin a personalized health world map to your portal dashboard.

Checkout the planned maintenance and health advisories views. Here you’ll find information about upcoming maintenance and recommended actions to prevent downtime.

In the health history view, you’ll find all past events that affected your resources.

Now that you’re well-versed with your new Service Health dashboard, let’s create a Service Health alert. The alert will notify you and your team the next time there is a Service Health event affecting you. Stay in-the-know with Azure Service Health alerts.

We care deeply about what you think of Azure Service Health. Giving feedback is easy! Simply select the feedback action in the bottom right and let us know how we can improve. We are listening.

Quelle: Azure

7. Juli 2017

da Agency

Tracking configuration changes for your Azure VM

In this blog post, I will talk about how to use the Change Tracking solution to detect in-guest changes on your Azure VMs. Right from within your Azure VM you can quickly assess details of changes that occurred across your system. We currently support tracking Software, Files, Windows Registry, Windows Services, and Linux Daemons.

This feature is currently in private preview. If you’re interested in trying it, please sign up here!

Enabling change tracking

From your VM, you can select “Track Changes” on the virtual machines blade, under Automation + Control. After selecting it, validation is performed to determine if the Change Tracking solution is enabled for this VM. If it is not enabled, you will have the option to enable the solution.

The solution enablement process usually takes only a few minutes but can take up to 15 minutes. During this time, you should not close the browser window. Once the solution is enabled and log data starts to flow to the workspace, it can take more than 30 minutes for data to be available for analysis in the dashboard described in the next section. We expect this timing to significantly improve in the future.

Visualize change in your VM

From the Change Tracking dashboard, you can view the changes that have occurred on your VM. The main set of graphs displays the configuration changes by time and change type. The interactive table below it shows the changes that occurred during the specified time range. By clicking on the table rows, you can see the details of each change.

To change the viewable time window, click on “Filter”. The default time range is the last 24 hours, but you can also set the time range to the last 30 minutes, last 1 hour, last 6 hours, last 7 days, last 30 days, or a custom time range. The Change Tracking solution tracks all Windows Services, all Linux Daemons, all Software, and some Linux Files (/etc/*.conf) by default; however, if you would like to collect additional Files and Windows Registry changes across your machines you can add them to the solution’s collection settings by clicking “Configure”. Please note: the configuration settings are universal across all machines under that workspace.

Once in the collection settings, you can go to the change type you wish to modify via the tabs at the top of the page. You can click the plus (+) icon to add a new collection setting for the designated change type, or you can click on a pre-existing setting to edit its properties.

Correlate Azure Activity Log Events for Your VM

If you have the Azure Activity Log solution funneling data to your OMS workspace, you can enable the Azure Activity correlation line graph to see the trend of Activity Log events for your VM that occurred within your Change Tracking time window.

To receive Azure Activity Logs in your OMS workspace, follow the steps below (from http://www.deployazure.com/management/operations-management-suite/azure-activity-log-analytics-alerts-with-operations-management-suite/)

Add the Azure Activity Log Analytics solution in OMS
Go to your workspace in Azure and click on "Azure Activity log" beneath Workspace Data Sources
Enable a connection to the subscription(s) of your choice
Data should start collecting

You can click on the Activity Log graph points to see what Activity Logs events occurred around that time. The results will open in Log Search.

OS support

We support all operating systems that meet the OMS agent requirements. Both x86 and x64 versions are officially supported on a variety of distributions. However, the OMS Agent might also run on other distributions not listed.

Windows

Windows Server 2008 SP 1 or later
Windows 7 SP1 or later

Linux

Amazon Linux 2012.09 through 2015.09
CentOS Linux 5, 6 and 7
Oracle Linus 5, 6, and 7
Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5, 6, and 7
Debian GNU/Linux 6, 7, and 8
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, 14.04 LTS, 15.04, and 15.10
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 and 12

New to OMS Change Tracking

If you are new to OMS Change Tracking, you can view the current capabilities which include change detection across both Windows and Linux machines in our documentation.
Quelle: Azure