Today on the 16th April 2013 Windows Azure IaaS Virtual Machines became general availability (GA), Windows Azure PaaS services first previewed in 2009 and then became GA in February 2010, since this time Microsoft have been adding more features and service to Windows Azure one of those being Windows Azure Virtual Machines which forms part of Azure IaaS feature set.
Windows Azure Virtual Machines first previewed in June 2012 during this period Microsoft have been running this service in Preview, Bill Hilf at Microsoft announced GA of Azure IaaS at 14:00 GMT in his blog article The Power of ‘And’.
What does this mean? find out below;
- Microsoft will now provide support for the service (as long as you have purchased one of the Azure Support offerings) details of support are available here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/plans/
- SLA is in effect, note Microsoft provide two SLA’s 99.9% and 99.95% based on the Service configuration and use of Fault Domains and Available sets. More information available here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/windows/common-tasks/manage-vm-availability/
- High memory compute, two new compute instances of 28GB, 4core and 56 GB, 8 core, this will help memory and processing hungry applications such as SharePoint, SQL Server, BizTalk etc…, more information here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/
- Microsoft have also reduced the compute GA prices on Virtual Machines and Cloud Services by 21-33%, and will follow Amazon Prices closely, further reduction can be found by pre commits and inclusion in EA: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/#header-3
Over the coming months Microsoft will be adding more server product images to the Gallery, currently available is BizTalk , Windows, SQL and some Linux flavours, for a list of Microsoft Supported server products please see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2721672
Microsoft FAQ available here: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/licensing-faq/
If you would help with Deploying Windows Azure IaaS Virtual Machines please contact ICS Solutions on 01256 403800 or attend one of our seminars.