Virtual Machines Archives

3 Dec 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Cloud Strategy, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Virtual Machines

SAP HANA backup using Azure Backup is now generally available

Today, we are sharing the general availability of Microsoft Azure Backup’s solution for SAP HANA databases in the UK South region.

Azure Backup is Azure’s native backup solution, which is BackInt certified by SAP. This offering aligns with Azure Backup’s mantra of zero-infrastructure backups, eliminating the need to deploy and manage backup infrastructure. You can now seamlessly backup and restore SAP HANA databases running on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VM) — M series Virtual Machine is also supported, and leverage enterprise management capabilities that Azure Backup provides.

Benefits

15-minute Recovery Point Objective (RPO): Recovery of critical data of up to 15 minutes is possible.
One-click, point-in-time restores: Easy to restore production data on SAP HANA databases to alternate servers. Chaining of backups and catalogs to perform restores is all managed by Azure behind the scenes.
Long-term retention: For rigorous compliance and audit needs, you can retain your backups for years, based on the retention duration, beyond which the recovery points will be pruned automatically by the built-in lifecycle management capability.
Backup Management from Azure: Use Azure Backup’s management and monitoring capabilities for improved management experience.

Watch this space for more updates on GA rollout to other regions. We are currently in preview in these Azure geos .

Getting started

We are working on making the SAP HANA backup experience even better. Find out the scenarios we support today.
See how to backup and restore SAP HANA databases.
Manage and Monitor the backed up SAP HANA databases.
Need help? Read the troubleshooting documentation. Or reach out to the Azure Backup forum for support.
Learn more about Azure backup.
Follow us on twitter @AzureBackup for more updates.

3 Dec 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Database, Developer, Virtual Machines

Faster and cheaper: SQL on Azure continues to outshine AWS

Over a million on-premises SQL Server databases have moved to Azure, representing a massive shift in where customers are collecting, storing, and analyzing their data.

Modernizing your databases provides the opportunity to transform your data architecture. SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines allows you to maintain control over your database and operating system while still benefiting from cloud flexibility and scale. For some, this represents a step in the journey to a fully-managed database, while others choose this deployment option for compatibility with on-premises workloads such as SQL Server Reporting Services.

Whatever the reason, migrating SQL workloads to Azure Virtual Machines is a popular option. Azure customers benefit from our unique built-in security and manageability capabilities, which automate tasks like patching and backups. In addition to providing these unparalleled innovations, it is important to provide customers with the best price-performance possible. Once again, SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines comes out on top.

Ready for the next stage of your modernization journey? Azure SQL Database is a fully-managed service that leads in price-performance for your mission-critical workloads and it provides limitless scale, built-in artificial intelligence, and industry-leading availability guarantees.

SQL Server on Azure leads in price-performance

GigaOm, an independent research firm, recently published a study comparing throughput performance between SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and SQL Server on AWS EC2. Azure emerged as the clear leader across both Windows and Linux for mission-critical workloads, up to 3.4 times faster and up to 87 percent less expensive than AWS EC2.¹

The images above are performance and price-performance comparisons from the GigaOm report. The performance metric is throughput (transactions per second, tps); higher performance is better. The price-performance metric is three-year pricing divided by throughput (transactions per second, tps), lower price-performance is better.

With Azure Ultra Disk, GigaOm was able to achieve 80,000 input or output per second (IOPS) per single disk, maxing out the virtual machine’s throughput limit, and well exceeding the capabilities of AWS provisioned IOPS.²

A key reason why Azure price-performance is superior to AWS is Azure BlobCache, which provides free reads. Given that most online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads today come with a ten-to-one read-to-write ratio, this provides customers with significant savings.

Unmatched innovation from the team that brought SQL Server to the world

With a proven track record over 25 years, the engineering team behind SQL Server continues to drive security and innovation to meet our customers’ changing needs. Whether executing on-premises, in the cloud, or on the edge, the result is the most comprehensive, consistent, and secure solution for your data.

Azure SQL Virtual Machines offer unique built-in security and manageability, including automatic security patching and automated high-availability, and database recovery to a specific point in time. Azure’s unique security capabilities include advanced data security for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines, which enables both vulnerability assessments and advanced threat protection. Customers self-installing SQL Server on virtual machines in the cloud can now register with our resource provider to enable this same functionality.

Get started with SQL in Azure today

Migrate from SQL Server on-premises to SQL Server 2019 in Azure Virtual Machines today. Get started with preconfigured Azure SQL Virtual Machine images on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Ubuntu, and Windows in minutes. Take advantage of the Azure Hybrid Benefit to reuse your existing on-premises Windows server and SQL Server licenses in Azure for significant savings.

When you add it up, SQL databases are simply best on Azure. Learn more about why SQL Server is best on Azure, and use a $200 in Azure credits with a free account³ or Azure Dev or Test credits⁴ for additional cost savings.

¹Price-performance claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm in October 2019. The study compared price performance between SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition in Azure E64s_v3 instance type with 4x P30 1TB Storage Pool data (Read-Only Cache) + 1x P20 0.5TB log (No Cache) and the SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition in AWS EC2 r4.16xlarge instance type with 1x 4TB gp2 data + 1x 1TB gp2 log. Benchmark data is taken from a GigaOm Analytic Field Test derived from a recognized industry standard, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E). The Field Test does not implement the full TPC-E benchmark and as such is not comparable to any published TPC-E benchmarks. The Field Test is based on a mixture of read-only and update intensive transactions that simulate activities found in complex OLTP application environments. Price-performance is calculated by GigaOm as the cost of running the cloud platform continuously for three years divided by transactions per second throughput. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in West US for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and Northern California for AWS EC2 as of October 2019. The pricing incorporates three-year reservations for Azure and AWS compute pricing, and Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server and Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and License Mobility for SQL Server in AWS, excluding Software Assurance costs. Price-performance results are based upon the configurations detailed in the GigaOm Analytic Field Test. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.

²Claims based on data from a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by GigaOm in October 2019. The study compared price-performance between SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition in Azure E64s_v3 instance type with 1x Ultra 1.5TB with 650MB per sec throughput and the SQL Server 2017 Enterprise Edition on Windows Server 2016 Datacenter edition in AWS EC2 r4.16xlarge instance type with 1x 1.5TB io1 provisioned log + data. Benchmark data is taken from a GigaOm Analytic Field Test derived from a recognized industry standard, TPC Benchmark™ E (TPC-E). The Field Test does not implement the full TPC-E benchmark and as such is not comparable to any published TPC-E benchmarks. The Field Test is based on a mixture of read-only and update intensive transactions that simulate activities found in complex OLTP application environments. Price-performance is calculated by GigaOm as the cost of running the cloud platform continuously for three years divided by transactions per second throughput. Prices are based on publicly available US pricing in north Europe for SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines and Ireland for AWS EC2 as of October 2019. Price-performance results are based upon the configurations detailed in the GigaOm Analytic Field Test. Actual results and prices may vary based on configuration and region.

³Additional information about $200 Azure free account available at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/free/.

⁴Dev or Test Azure credits and pricing available for paid Visual Studio subscribers only.

22 Nov 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Virtual Machines

Azure Backup support for SQL Server 2019 and Restore as files

As SQL Server 2019 continues to push the boundaries of availability, performance, and data intelligence, a centrally managed, enterprise-scale backup solution is imperative to ensure the protection of all that data. This is especially true if you are running the SQL Server in the cloud to leverage the benefits of dynamic scale and don’t want to continue using the legacy backup methods that are tedious, infrastructure-heavy, and difficult to scale.

We are excited to share native backup for SQL Server 2019 running in Azure Virtual Machine. This is a key addition to the general availability of Azure Backup for SQL Server Virtual Machine, announced earlier this year. Azure Backup is a zero-infrastructure solution that protects standalone SQL Server and SQL AlwaysOn configurations in Azure Virtual Machine without the need to deploy and manage any backup infrastructure. While it offers long-term retention and central monitoring capabilities to help IT admins govern and meet their compliance requirements, it lets SQL Admin continue to exercise the power of self-service backup and restore for operational recoveries.

In addition to this, we are also sharing Azure Backup general availability for:

SQL Server 2008 and 2008 R2 migrating to Azure as SQL Server running in virtual machines.
SQL Server running on Windows 2019

Restore as files:

Adding to the list of enhancements is the key capability of Restore as Files, now restore anywhere by recovering the backed-up data as .bak files. Move these backup files across subscriptions, regions, or even to on-premises SQL Servers and trigger database restore wherever you want. Besides aiding cross-subscription and cross-region restore scenarios, this feature helps users stay compliant by giving them greater control over storing and recovering backup data to any destination of their choice.

Getting started:

Under the Restore operation, you will see a newly introduced option of Restore as files. Specify the destination server (this server should be SQL Server Virtual Machine registered to the vault) and path on that server. The service will dump all the .bak files specific to the recovery point you have chosen to this path. Typically, a network share path or path of a mounted Azure File share when specified as the destination enables easier access to these files by other machines in the same network or with the same Azure File share mounted on them.

Once the restore operation is completed, you can move these files to any machine across subscriptions or locations and restore them as a database using SQL Server Management Studio. Learn more.

Additional resources

Watch the getting started video.
Want more details about this feature? Review the Azure Backup for SQL Server documentation.
Get the Azure Backup pricing details for this feature.

12 Nov 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Virtual Machines

Announcing the general availability of the new Azure HPC Cache service

If data-access challenges have been keeping you from running high-performance computing (HPC) jobs in Azure, we’ve got great news to report! The now-available Microsoft Azure HPC Cache service lets you run your most demanding workloads in Azure without the time and cost of rewriting applications and while storing data where you want to—in Azure or on your on-premises storage. By minimizing latency between compute and storage, the HPC Cache service seamlessly delivers the high-speed data access required to run your HPC applications in Azure.

Use Azure to expand analytic capacity—without worrying about data access

Most HPC teams recognize the potential for cloud bursting to expand analytic capacity. While many organizations would benefit from the capacity and scale advantages of running compute jobs in the cloud, users have been held back by the size of their datasets and the complexity of providing access to those datasets, typically stored on long-deployed network-attached storage (NAS) assets. These NAS environments often hold petabytes of data collected over a long period of time and represent significant infrastructure investment.

Here’s where the HPC Cache service can help. Think of the service as an edge cache that provides low-latency access to POSIX file data sourced from one or more locations, including on-premises NAS and data archived to Azure Blob storage. The HPC Cache makes it easy to use Azure to increase analytic throughput, even as the size and scope of your actionable data expands.

Keep up with the expanding size and scope of actionable data

The rate of new data acquisition in certain industries such as life sciences continues to drive up the size and scope of actionable data. Actionable data, in this case, could be datasets that require post-collection analysis and interpretation that in turn drive upstream activity. A sequenced genome can approach hundreds of gigabytes, for example. As the rate of sequencing activity increases and becomes more parallel, the amount of data to store and interpret also increases—and your infrastructure has to keep up. Your power to collect, process, and interpret actionable data—your analytic capacity—directly impacts your organization’s ability to meet the needs of customers and to take advantage of new business opportunities.

Some organizations address expanding analytic throughput requirements by continuing to deploy more robust on-premises HPC environment with high-speed networking and performant storage. But for many companies, expanding on-premises environments presents increasingly daunting and costly challenges. For example, how can you accurately forecast and more economically address new capacity requirements? How do you best juggle equipment lifecycles with bursts in demand? How can you ensure that storage keeps up (in terms of latency and throughput) with compute demands? And how can you manage all of it with limited budget and staffing resources?

Azure services can help you more easily and cost-effectively expand your analytic throughput beyond the capacity of existing HPC infrastructure. You can use tools like Azure CycleCloud and Azure Batch to orchestrate and schedule compute jobs on Azure virtual machines (VMs). More effectively manage cost and scale by using low-priority VMs, as well as Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Use Azure’s latest H- and N-series Virtual Machines to meet performance requirements for your most complex workloads.

So how do you start? It’s straightforward. Connect your network to Azure via ExpressRoute, determine which VMs you will use, and coordinate processes using CycleCloud or Batch—voila, your burstable HPC environment is ready to go. All you need to do is feed it data. Ok, that’s the stickler. This is where you need the HPC Cache service.

Use HPC Cache to ensure fast, consistent data access

Most organizations recognize the benefits of using cloud: a burstable HPC environment can give you more analytic capacity without forcing new capital investments. And Azure offers additional pluses, letting you take advantage of your current schedulers and other toolsets to ensure deployment consistency with your on-premises environment.

But here’s the catch when it comes to data. Your libraries, applications, and location of data may require the same consistency. In some circumstances, a local analytic pipeline may rely on POSIX paths that must be the same whether running in Azure or locally. Data may be linked between directories, and those links may need to be deployed in the same way in the cloud. The data itself may reside in multiple locations and must be aggregated. Above all else, the latency of access must be consistent with what can be realized in the local HPC environment.

To understand how the HPC Cache works to address these requirements, consider it an edge cache that provides low-latency access to POSIX file data sourced from one or more locations. For example, a local environment may contain a large HPC cluster connected to a commercial NAS solution. HPC Cache enables access from that NAS solution to Azure Virtual Machines, containers, or machine learning routines operating across a WAN link. The service accomplishes this by caching client requests (including from the virtual machines), and ensuring that subsequent accesses of that data are serviced by the cache rather than by re-accessing the on-premises NAS environment. This lets you run your HPC jobs at a similar performance level as you could in your own data center. HPC Cache also lets you build a namespace consisting of data located in multiple exports across multiple sources while displaying a single directory structure to client machines.

HPC Cache provides a Blob-backed cache (we call it Blob-as-POSIX) in Azure as well, facilitating migration of file-based pipelines without requiring that you rewrite applications. For example, a genetic research team can load reference genome data into the Blob environment to further optimize the performance of secondary-analysis workflows. This helps mitigate any latency concerns when you launch new jobs that rely on a static set of reference libraries or tools.

Azure HPC Cache Architecture

HPC Cache Benefits

Caching throughput to match workload requirements

HPC Cache offers three SKUs: up to 2 gigabytes per second (GB/s), up to 4 GB/s, and up to 8 GB/s throughput. Each of these SKUs can service requests from tens to thousands of VMs, containers, and more. Furthermore, you choose the size of your cache disks to control your costs while ensuring the right capacity is available for caching.

Data bursting from your datacenter

HPC Cache fetches data from your NAS, wherever it is. Run your HPC workload today and figure out your data storage policies over the longer term.

High-availability connectivity

HPC Cache provides high-availability (HA) connectivity to clients, a key requirement for running compute jobs at larger scales.

Aggregated namespace

The HPC Cache aggregated namespace functionality lets you build a namespace out of various sources of data. This abstraction of sources makes it possible to run multiple HPC Cache environments with a consistent view of data.

Lower-cost storage, full POSIX compliance with Blob-as-POSIX

HPC Cache supports Blob-based, fully POSIX-compliant storage. HPC Cache, using the Blob-as-POSIX format, maintains full POSIX support including hard links. If you need this level of compliance, you’ll be able to get full POSIX at Blob price points.

Start here

The Azure HPC Cache Service is available today and can be accessed now. For the very best results, contact your Microsoft team or related partners—they’ll help you build a comprehensive architecture that optimally meets your specific business objectives and desired outcomes.

Our experts will be attending at SC19 in Denver, Colorado, the conference on high-performance computing, ready and eager to help you accelerate your file-based workloads in Azure!

6 Nov 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Virtual Machines

Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) for every workload

This week at Microsoft Ignite, we announced several important additions to our Azure infrastructure as a service (IaaS) portfolio.

Many companies, including GEICO, H&R Block, and CONA Services, rely on Azure to run a very diverse set of business-critical workloads, often requiring dynamic and scalable infrastructure that delivers unparalleled performance.

In order to meet the needs of this diverse and growing set of mission-critical workloads that call Azure home, our infrastructure services continue to evolve to optimize the experience of running these workloads.

Comprehensive infrastructure solutions: Flexibility and choice

We announced several new offerings that expand our portfolio of available virtual machine (VM) instance sizes for general purpose, memory-intensive, and remote visualization scenarios, including the ability to run VMware environments natively and enhancements to the platform that make it even easier to migrate your workloads to Azure.

Ea v4, Eas v4, Da v4, and Das v4 series Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines now available

After being the first global cloud provider to announce the preview of Azure Virtual Machines based on the AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor, we’ve been working together with our technology partners, including AMD, to continue bringing the latest innovation to enterprises. 

This week we’re announcing the availability of the Da v4 and Das v4 Azure Virtual Machine series for general purpose Linux and Windows applications, and the Ea v4 and Eas v4 Azure Virtual Machine series for memory-intensive Linux and Windows workloads.

These new Azure Virtual Machines feature the latest AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor and up to 96 vCPUs, 672 GiBs of RAM, and 2,400 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage. The Das-series and the Eas-series Virtual Machines support Azure Premium SSDs and will include Ultra Disk support in the near future.

New NVv4 series Azure Virtual Machines preview available

We are also enhancing our compute portfolio for Windows Virtual Desktops and high-performance computing (HPC) workloads with the preview of NVv4. These new Azure Virtual Machines feature the latest AMD EPYC™ 7742 processor and will be the first visualization-optimized Azure Virtual Machine to offer AMD RADEON INSTINCT™ MI25 GPUs. NVv4 (currently in preview) offers enhanced GPU resourcing flexibility, giving customers more choice by offering partitioned GPUs built using industry-standard SR-IOV technology. Customers can select the right size of GPU Virtual Machines with as little as 2GB of dedicated GPU frame buffer for an entry-level desktop in the cloud, and up to the whole GPU with 16GB of frame buffer to provide powerful engineering workstations. This makes entry-level and low-intensity GPU workloads more cost-effective while still giving customers the option to scale up to full-GPU processing power delivered by AMD RADEON INSTINCT™ MI25 GPUs.

Azure VMware Solutions now available in West Europe

We’re also announcing the availability of Azure VMware Solutions in the West Europe Azure region. If you are currently managing an on-premises VMware environment, Azure VMware Solutions delivers the ability to run your VMware environment natively on Azure. This gives you the option to leverage your existing VMware skills and investments while taking full advantage of the scale and automation Azure offers. Azure VMware Solutions is now supported in East US, West US, and West Europe regions.

New Azure Migrate features to streamline migration

Azure Migrate is a central hub for all your migration needs and now delivers new capabilities to accelerate the migration of physical servers and virtual machines. We have also made enhancements to the Server Assessment capabilities that reduce friction through agentless discovery options. And to ensure you have the information you need for migration; we now provide deeper application dependency analysis. Refer to the documentation for more details.

A dynamic and scalable infrastructure for uncompromised performance

One of the most valuable promises of cloud infrastructure is the ability to meet evolving business and IT requirements. In our mission to continuously improve customers’ access to dynamic and scalable infrastructure, we’ve made a couple of important additions to our portfolio.

Azure generation 2 virtual machines now generally available

Generation 2 virtual machines are now generally available on Azure. Generation 2 VMs provide support for Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX), UEFI boot architecture, and the ability to provision large VMs (up to 12TB) and OS Disks sizes that exceed 2TB.  

Generation 2 VMs are fully supported in the portal, CLI, and PowerShell interfaces, and customers can opt to use them during the provisioning and deployment process, depending on their needs. Please refer to the Windows and Linux documentation for more information.

New Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets features now in preview

We’re also introducing the preview of new features for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets that will greatly simplify the experience of running virtual machines at scale, as well as improve the runtime capabilities and performance of these workloads. 

In addition to supporting a homogeneous set of VMs for a scalable app layer, you can now create an empty virtual machine scale set and add various VMs (even those belonging to different VM series) later during the VM creation process. This will allow you to achieve high availability, for example, by deploying a set of virtual machines to a single availability zone or across different fault domains in an availability zone. You can now use a Virtual Machine Scale Set to deploy a SQL high availability (HA) cluster with high availability in a zone. This will provide the high availability of SQL primary, secondary, and witness VMs in unique fault domains while maintaining the lower inter-VM network latency that is seen within an availability zone.

You can now also provision VMs with custom images using the Azure Shared Image Gallery, which provides a quick, easy and scalable way to share images across different VMs and also accelerates provisioning times.

You can also specify a scale-in policy that gives you control over the order in which VMs should be de-provisioned. Termination notifications now give customers up to 15 minutes to perform any clean-up or other pre-shutdown tasks before VMs are deprovisioned, and you can now use instance protection from scale-in to designate VMs that should not be deprovisioned during a scale-in action. 

All these new features will help you get your applications up and running quickly while giving you additional control over how your applications can scale to meet your requirements. 

HBv2 Azure Virtual Machines for HPC workloads coming soon

HBv2 VMs are designed to deliver supercomputer-class performance, message passing interface (MPI) scalability, and cost efficiency for a variety of real-world HPC workloads. HBv2 Virtual Machines support up to 80,000 cores for single MPI jobs to deliver performance that rivals some of the world’s largest and most powerful bare metal supercomputers.

Updated NDv2 Azure Virtual Machines preview

The NDv2-series Virtual Machines, currently in preview, are the latest, fastest, and most powerful addition to the GPU family, specifically designed for the cutting edge demands of distributed HPC, AI, and machine learning workloads. These VMs feature 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 NVLINK interconnected GPUs with 32 GB of memory each, 40 non-hyperthreaded Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, and 672 GiB of system memory. The NDv2-series Virtual Machines (currently in preview) also feature 100 Gb/sec EDR InfiniBand with support for standard Mellanox OFED drivers and all MPI types and versions. With total of 256 GB of GPU memory and 100 Gb/sec InfiniBand interconnect NDv2-series Virtual Machines are ready for the most demanding machine learning models and distributed AI training workloads utilizing CUDA, TensorFlow, Pytorch, Caffe, and other frameworks.

Proximity placement groups now generally available

A proximity placement group is a logical grouping capability for Azure Virtual Machines that you can use to decrease the network latency between a set of virtual machines. When you assign your virtual machines to a proximity placement group, their placement is optimized to deliver lower latency for your latency-sensitive workloads. We’ve seen robust customer adoption of this new feature during the preview over the last few months, and we’re pleased to now make Proximity Placement Groups generally available in most Azure regions. Please check the documentation for more information.

Azure Spot Virtual Machines

Finally, Azure Spot Virtual Machines, which give you access to unused Azure compute capacity at deep discounts, will be available soon. Spot Virtual Machines will be ideal for workloads that can be interrupted, providing scalability while reducing costs. You will be able to take advantage of Spot Virtual Machine pricing for Azure Virtual Machines or Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) to deploy opportunistic workloads of all sizes. We expect to preview this by early 2020.

In conclusion, there has never been a better time to run your workloads on, or to migrate to, Azure. We hope you enjoy Microsoft Ignite!

Additional Resources

Da series Azure Virtual Machines Linux and Windows documentation
Ea series Azure Virtual Machines Linux and Windows documentation
Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets documentation
Azure generation 2 Virtual Machines documentation (Windows and Linux)

Azure. Invent with purpose.

8 Oct 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Security, Virtual Machines

SAP on Azure–Designing for availability and recoverability

This is the third in a four-part blog series on Designing a great SAP on Azure Architecture.

Robust SAP on Azure Architectures are built on the pillars of security, performance and scalability, availability and recoverability, efficiency and operations.

We covered designing for performance and scalability previously and within this blog we will focus on availability and recoverability.

Designing for availability

Designing for availability ensures that your mission critical SAP applications such as SAP ERP or S/4HANA have high-availability (HA) provisions applied. These HA provisions ensure the application is resilient to both hardware and software failures and that the SAP application uptime is secured to meet your service-level-agreements (SLAs).

Within the links below, you will find a comprehensive overview on Azure virtual machine maintenance versus downtime where unplanned hardware maintenance events, unexpected downtime and planned maintenance events are covered in detail.

From an availability perspective the options you have for deploying SAP on Azure are as follows:

99.9 percent SLA for single instance VMs with Azure premium storage. In this case, the SAP database (DB), system central services A(SCS) and application servers are either running on separate VMs or consolidated on one or more VMs. A 99.9 percent SLA is also offered on our single node, bare metal HANA Large Instances.
99.95 percent SLA for VMs within the same Azure availability set. The availability set enforces that the VMs within the set are deployed in separate fault and update domains, in turn this ensures the VMs are safeguarded against unplanned hardware maintenance events, unexpected downtime and planned maintenance events. To ensure HA of the SAP application, the availability sets are used in conjunction with Azure Load Balancers, guest operating system clustering technologies such as Windows Failover cluster or Linux Pacemaker to facilitate short failover times and synchronous database replication technologies (SQL AlwaysOn, HANA System Replication, etc) to guarantee no loss of data. Additionally, configuring the SAP Enqueue Replication Server can mitigate against loss of the SAP lock table during a failover of the A(SCS).
99.99 percent SLA for VMs within Azure availability zones. An availability zone in an Azure region is a combination of a fault domain and an update domain. The Azure platform recognizes this distribution across update domains to ensure that VMs in different zones are not updated at the same time in the case of Azure planned maintenance events. Additionally, availability zones are physically separate zones within an Azure region where each zone has its own power source, network, cooling and is logically separated from the other zones within the Azure region. This construct hedges against unexpected downtime due to a hardware or infrastructure failure within a given zone. By architecting the SAP deployment to leverage replication across zones i.e. DBMS replication (HANA System Replication, SQL AlwaysOn), SAP Enqueue Replication Server and distributing the SAP application servers (for redundancy) across zones you can protect the SAP system from the loss of a complete datacenter. If one zone is compromised, the SAP System will be available in another zone. For an overview of Azure availability zones and our latest Mv2 VM offering you can check out this video.
HANA Large Instances are offered at an SLA of 99.99 percent when they are configured as an HA pair, this applies to single datacenter and availability zones deployments.

In the case of availability sets and availability zones, guest OS clustering is necessary for HA. We would like to use this opportunity to clarify the Linux Pacemaker Fencing options on Azure to avoid split brain of your SAP application, these are:

Azure Fencing Agent
Storage Based Death (SBD)

The Azure Fencing Agent is available on both RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and SUSE Enterprise Linux (SLES) and SBD is supported by SLES, but not RHEL; for the shortest cluster failover times for SAP on Azure with Pacemaker, we recommend:

Azure Fencing Agent for SAP clusters built on RHEL.
SBD for SAP clusters built on SLES

In the case of productive SAP applications, we strongly recommend availability sets or availability zones. Availability zones are an alternative to availability sets to provide HA with the addition of resiliency to datacenter failures within an Azure region. However, be mindful, there is no guarantee of a certain distances between the building structures hosting different availability zones. Different Azure regions can encounter different setups in terms of distance of the physical buildings. Therefore, for deterministic application performance and the lowest network Round-Trip-Time (RTT), Availability sets could be the better option.

Single Instance VMs can be a good fit for non-production (project, sandbox and test SAP systems) which don’t have availability SLAs on the same level as production, this option also helps to minimize run costs.

Designing for recoverability

Designing for recoverability means recovering from data loss, such as a logical error on the SAP database, from large scale disasters, or loss of a complete Azure region. When designing for recoverability, it is necessary to understand the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of your SAP Application. Azure Regional Pairs are recommended for disaster recovery which offer isolation and availability to hedge against the risks of natural or human disasters impacting a single region.

On the DBMS layer, asynchronous replication can be used to replicate your production data from your primary region to your disaster recovery (DR) region. On the SAP application layer, Azure-to-Azure Site Recovery can be used as part of an efficient, cost-conscious DR solution. You could also choose to architect a dual-purpose scenario on your DR side such as running a combined QA/DR system for a better return on your investments as shown below.

In addition to HA and DR provisions an enterprise data protection solution for backup and recovery of your SAP data is essential.

Our first party Azure Backup offering is certified for SAP HANA, the solution is currently in public preview (as of September 2019) and supports SAP HANA scale-up (data and log backup) with further scenarios to be supported in the future such as data snapshot and SAP HANA scale-out.

Additionally, the Azure platforms supports a broad range of ISVs which offer enterprise data protection and management for your SAP applications. One such ISV is Commvault where Microsoft have recently partnered to produce this whitepaper. A key advantage of Commvault is the IntelliSnap (data snapshot) capability which offers instantaneous application consistent data snapshots of your SAP database – this is hugely beneficial for large databases which have low RTO requirements. Commvault facilitates highly performant multi-streaming (backint) data backup directly to Azure Blob storage for both SAP HANA scale-up, SAP HANA scale-out and anyDB workloads. Your enterprise data protection strategy can include a combination of data snapshots and data backup i.e. running daily snapshots and a data backup (backint) on the weekend. Below, a data snapshot executed via IntelliSnap against an SAP HANA database on an M128s (2TB) VM, the snapshot duration is 20 seconds.

Within this blog we have summarized the options for designing SAP on Azure for Availability and Recoverability. When architecting and deploying your production SAP applications on Azure, it is essential to include availability sets or availability zones to support your mission critical SAP SLAs. Furthermore, you should apply DR provisions and enterprise data protection to secure your SAP application against the loss of a complete Azure region or data corruption.

Be sure to execute HA and DR testing through the lifecycle of your SAP to Azure project and also re-test these capabilities during maintenance windows once your SAP Applications are in productive operations i.e. DR drill tests annually.
Availability and Recoverability should be reviewed on an ongoing basis to incorporate the latest technologies and guidance on best practices from Microsoft.

In blog #4 in our series we will cover designing for efficiency and operations.

4 Oct 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Virtual Machines

Introducing the preview of direct-upload to Azure managed disks

We are excited to announce the preview of direct-upload to Azure managed disks. Today, there are two ways you can bring your on-premises VHD files to Azure as managed disks:

Stage the VHD into a storage account before converting them into managed disks
Attach an empty managed disk to a VM and do copy.

Both these ways have disadvantage. The first option requires extra storage account to manage while the second option has extra cost of running virtual machine. Direct-upload addresses both these issues and provides a simplified workflow by allowing copy of your on-premises VHD into an empty managed disk. You can use it to upload to Standard HDD, Standard SSD, and Premium SSD managed disks of all the supported sizes.

If you are an independent software vendor (ISV) providing backup solution for IaaS virtual machines in Azure, we recommend you leverage direct-upload to restore your customers’ backups to managed disks. It will help simplify the restore process by getting away from storage account management. Our Azure Backup support for large managed disks is powered by direct-upload. It uses direct-upload to restore large managed disks.

For increased productivity, Azure Storage Explorer also added support for managed disks. It exposes direct-upload via an easy-to-use graphical user interface (GUI), enabling you to migrate your local VHD files to managed disks in few clicks. Moreover, it also leverages direct-upload to enable you to copy and migrate your managed disks seamlessly to another Azure region. This cross-region copy is powered by AzCopy v10 which is designed to support large-scale data movement in Azure.

If you choose to use Azure Compute Rest API or SDKs, you must first create an empty managed disk by setting the createOption property to Upload and the uploadSizeBytes property to match the exact size of the VHD being uploaded.

Rest API

{
   "location": "WestUS2",
   "properties": {
     "creationData": {
       "createOption": "Upload",
       "uploadSizeBytes": 10737418752
     }
   }
}

Azure CLI

az disk create 
-n mydiskname 
-g resourcegroupname 
-l westus2 
--for-upload 
--upload-size-bytes 10737418752 
--sku standard_lrs

You must generate a writeable SAS for the disk, so you can reference it as the destination for your upload.

az disk grant-access 
-n mydiskname 
-g resourcegroupname 
--access-level Write 
--duration-in-seconds 86400

Use AzCopy v10 to upload your local VHD file to the empty managed disk by specifying the SAS URI you generated.

AzCopy copy "c:somewheremydisk.vhd" "SAS-URI" --blob-type PageBlob

After the upload is complete, and you no longer need to write any more data to the disk, revoke the SAS. Revoking the SAS will change the state of the managed disk and allow you to attach the disk to a virtual machine.

az disk revoke-access -n mydiskname -g resourcegroupname

Supported regions

All regions are supported via Azure Compute Rest API version 2019-03-01, latest version of Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell SDK, Azure .Net SDK, AzCopy v10 and Storage explorer.

Getting started

26 Sep 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Virtual Machines

New disk support capabilities in Azure Storage Explorer

The release of Storage Explorer 1.10.0 brings many exciting updates and new features that we hope can help you be more productive and efficient when working with your Azure Storage Accounts. If you’ve never used Storage Explorer before, make sure to head to our product page, and download it for your favorite operating system. In this post, we’ll go over the newly added support for virtual machine (VM) disk management that was added in the 1.10.0 release.

Easily backup and restore VMs with disk support

Managed disks have been simplifying Azure VM creation and maintenance over page blobs, blob containers and storage accounts. Today, Azure managed disks are the default storage option for Azure IaaS VMs. Recently, we introduced the Direct Upload API that allows you to upload data from on-premises without staging the data in a storage account. Azure Storage Explorer further simplifies those tasks by providing performant upload and download capabilities for creating and accessing managed disks. Here are two example scenarios for how the new features benefit customers like you:

We learned it is common to migrate VMs from on-premises to Azure. With Storage Explorer you can conveniently perform this task using the following steps in the documentation.

Figure 1: Upload a VHD using Storage Explorer

Backup and restore operations are also very common practices in customers’ disaster recovery strategy. A typical scenario is rolling back VMs to last known good version by restoring disks from snapshots after a regional outage or an application upgrade failure.

The workflow is now simplified with managed disks support in Storage Explorer. In the 1.10.0 release you can snapshot a disk just like any other blob to back up the current version. In upcoming releases, we will fully support creating disks from snapshots to complete the end-to-end scenario.

Figure 1: Capturing snapshot of VHDs from an Azure VM

Next steps

Download Storage Explorer 1.10.0 today and start efficiently managing your VMs and disks. If you have any feedback, please make sure to open a new issue on our GitHub repo. If you are experiencing difficulties using the product, please open a support ticket following these instructions.

23 Aug 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Cloud Strategy, IT Pro, Management, Updates, Virtual Machines

Plan migration of your Hyper-V servers using Azure Migrate Server Assessment

Azure Migrate is focused on streamlining your migration journey to Azure. We recently announced the evolution of Azure Migrate, which provides a streamlined, comprehensive portfolio of Microsoft and partner tools to meet migration needs, all in one place. An important capability included in this release is upgrades to Server Assessment for at-scale assessments of VMware and Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs.)

This is the first in a series of blogs about the new capabilities in Azure Migrate. In this post, I will talk about capabilities in Server Assessment that help you plan for migration of Hyper-V servers. This capability is now generally available as part of the Server Assessment feature of Azure Migrate. After assessing your servers for migration, you can migrate your servers using Microsoft’s Server Migration solution available on Azure Migrate. You can get started right away by creating an Azure Migrate project.

Server Assessment earlier supported assessment of VMware VMs for migration to Azure. We’ve now included Azure suitability analysis, migration cost planning, performance-based rightsizing, and application dependency analysis for Hyper-V VMs. You can now plan at-scale, assessing up to 35,000 Hyper-V servers in one Azure Migrate project. If you use VMware as well, you can discover and assess both Hyper-V and VMware servers in the same Azure Migrate project. You can create groups of servers, assess by group, and refine the groups further using application dependency information.

Azure suitability analysis

The assessment determines whether a given server can be migrated as-is to Azure. Azure support is checked for each server discovered. If it is found that a server is not ready to be migrated, remediation guidance is automatically provided. You can customize your assessment and regenerate the assessment reports. You can apply subscription offers and reserved instance pricing on the cost estimates. You can also generate a cost estimate by choosing a VM series of your choice, and specify the uptime of the workloads you will run in Azure.

Cost estimation and sizing

Assessment reports provide detailed cost estimates. You can optimize on cost using performance-based rightsizing assessments. The performance data of your on-premise server is taken into consideration to recommend an appropriate Azure VM and disk SKU. This helps to optimize and right-size on cost as you migrate servers that might be over-provisioned in your on-premise data center.

Dependency analysis

Once you have established cost estimates and migration readiness, you can go ahead and plan your migration phases. Use the dependency analysis feature to understand the dependencies between your applications. This is helpful to understand which workloads are interdependent and need to be migrated together, ensuring you do not leave critical elements behind on-premises. You can visualize the dependencies in a map or extract the dependency data in a tabular format. You can divide your servers into groups and refine the groups for migration using this feature.

Assess your Hyper-V servers in three simple steps:

Create an Azure Migrate project and add the Server Assessment solution to the project.
Set up the Azure Migrate appliance and start discovery of your Hyper-V virtual machines. To set up discovery, the Hyper-V host or cluster names are required. Each appliance supports discovery of 5,000 VMs from up to 300 Hyper-V hosts. You can set up more than one appliance if required.
Once you have successfully set up discovery, create assessments and review the assessment reports.
Use the application dependency analysis features to create and refine server groups to phase your migration.

Note that the inventory metadata gathered is persisted in the geography you select while creating the project. You can select a geography of your choice. Server Assessment is available today in Asia Pacific, Australia, Azure Government, Canada, Europe, India, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States geographies.

When you are ready to migrate the servers to Azure, you can use Server Migration to carry out the migration. You will be able automatically carry over the assessment recommendations from Server Assessment into Server Migration. You can read more in our documentation “Migrate Hyper-V VMs to Azure.”

In the coming months, we will add assessment capabilities for physical servers. You will also be able to run a quick assessment by adding inventory information using a CSV file. Stay tuned!

In the upcoming blogs, we will talk about tools for scale assessments, scale migrations, and the partner integrations available in Azure Migrate.

Resources to get started

Tutorial on how to assess Hyper-V servers using the server assessment feature of Azure Migrate.
Prerequisites for assessment of Hyper-V servers.
Guide on how to plan an assessment for a large-scale environment. Each appliance supports discovery of 5,000 VMs from up to 300 Hyper-V hosts.
Tutorial on how to migrate Hyper-V servers using the Server Migration feature of Azure Migrate.

16 Aug 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Virtual Machines

Azure Ultra Disk Storage: Microsoft’s service for your most I/O demanding workloads

Today, Tad Brockway, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Azure, announced the general availability of Azure Ultra Disk Storage, an Azure Managed Disks offering that provides massive throughput with sub-millisecond latency for your most I/O demanding workloads. With the introduction of Ultra Disk Storage, Azure includes four types of persistent disk—Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. This portfolio gives you price and performance options tailored to meet the requirements of every workload. Ultra Disk Storage delivers consistent performance and low latency for I/O intensive workloads like SAP Hana, OLTP databases, NoSQL, and other transaction-heavy workloads. Further, you can reach maximum virtual machine (VM) I/O limits with a single Ultra disk, without having to stripe multiple disks.

Durability of data is essential to business-critical enterprise workloads. To ensure we keep our durability promise, we built Ultra Disk Storage on our existing locally redundant storage (LRS) technology, which stores three copies of data within the same availability zone. Any application that writes to storage will receive an acknowledgement only after it has been durably replicated to our LRS system.

Below is a clip from a presentation I delivered at Microsoft Ignite demonstrating the leading performance of Ultra Disk Storage:

Microsoft Ignite 2018: Azure Ultra Disk Storage demo

Below are some quotes from customers in our preview program:

“With Ultra Disk Storage, we achieved consistent sub-millisecond latency at high IOPS and throughput levels on a wide range of disk sizes. Ultra Disk Storage also allows us to fine tune performance characteristics based on the workload.”

– Amit Patolia, Storage Engineer, DEVON ENERGY

“Ultra Disk Storage provides powerful configuration options that can leverage the full throughput of a VM SKU. The ability to control IOPS and MBps is remarkable.”

– Edward Pantaleone, IT Administrator, Tricore HCM

Inside Ultra Disk Storage

Ultra Disk Storage is our next generation distributed block storage service that provides disk semantics for Azure IaaS VMs and containers. We designed Ultra Disk Storage with the goal of providing consistent performance at high IOPS without compromising our durability promise. Hence, every write operation replicates to the storage in three different racks (fault domains) before being acknowledged to the client. Compared to Azure Premium Storage, Ultra Disk Storage provides its extreme performance without relying on Azure Blob storage cache, our on-server SSD-based cache, and hence it only supports un-cached reads and writes. We also introduced a new simplified client on the compute host that we call virtual disk client (VDC). VDC has full knowledge of virtual disk metadata mappings to disks in the Ultra Disk Storage cluster backing them. That enables the client to talk directly to storage servers, bypassing load balancers and front-end servers used for initial disk connections. This simplified approach minimizes the layers that a read or write operation traverses, reducing latency and delivering performance comparable to enterprise flash disk arrays.

Below is a figure comparing the different layers an operation traverses when issued on an Ultra disk compared to a Premium SSD disk. The operation flows from the client to Hyper-V to the corresponding driver. For an operation done on a Premium SSD disk, the operation will flow from the Azure Blob storage cache driver to the load balancers, front end servers, partition servers then down to the stream layer servers as documented in this paper. For an operation done on an Ultra disk, the operation will flow directly from the virtual disk client to the corresponding storage servers.

Comparison between the IO flow for Ultra Disk Storage versus Premium SSD Storage

One key benefit of Ultra Disk Storage is that you can dynamically tune disk performance without detaching your disk or restarting your virtual machines. Thus, you can scale performance along with your workload. When you adjust either IOPS or throughput, the new performance settings take effect in less than an hour.

Azure implements two levels of throttles that can cap disk performance, a “leaky bucket” VM level throttle that is specific to each VM size, described in documentation. A key benefit of Ultra Disk Storage is a new time-based disk level throttle that is applied at the disk level. This new throttle system provides more realistic behavior of a disk for a given IOPS and throughput. Hitting a leaky bucket throttle can cause erratic performance, while the new time-based throttle provides consistent performance even at the throttle limit. To take advantage of this smoother performance, set your disk throttles slightly less than your VM throttle. We will publish another blog post in the future describing more details about our new throttle system.

Available regions

Currently, Ultra Disk Storage is available in the following regions:

East US 2
North Europe
Southeast Asia

We will expand the service to more regions soon. Please refer to the FAQ for the latest on supported regions.

Virtual machine sizes

Ultra Disk Storage is supported on DSv3 and ESv3 virtual machine types. Additional virtual machine types will be supported soon. Refer to the FAQ for the latest on supported VM sizes.

Get started today

You can request onboarding to Azure Ultra Disk Storage by submitting an online request or by reaching out to your Microsoft representative. For general availability limitations refer to the documentation.

16 Aug 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Storage, Backup & Recovery, Virtual Machines

Announcing the general availability of Azure Ultra Disk Storage

Today, we are announcing the general availability (GA) of Microsoft Azure Ultra Disk Storage—a new Managed Disks offering that delivers unprecedented and extremely scalable performance with sub-millisecond latency for the most demanding Azure Virtual Machines and container workloads. With Ultra Disk Storage, customers are now able to lift-and-shift mission critical enterprise applications to the cloud including applications like SAP HANA, top tier SQL databases such as SQL Server, Oracle DB, MySQL, and PostgreSQL, as well as NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and Cassandra. With the introduction of Ultra Disk Storage, Azure now offers four types of persistent disks—Ultra Disk Storage, Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. This portfolio gives our customers a comprehensive set of disk offerings for every workload.

Ultra Disk Storage is designed to provide customers with extreme flexibility when choosing the right performance characteristics for their workloads. Customers can now have granular control on the size, IOPS, and bandwidth of Ultra Disk Storage to meet their specific performance requirements. Organizations can achieve the maximum I/O limit of a virtual machine (VM) with Ultra Disk Storage without having to stripe multiple disks. Check out the blog post “Azure Ultra Disk Storage: Microsoft’s service for your most I/O demanding workloads” from Azure’s Chief Technology Officer, Mark Russinovich, for a deep under-the-hood view.

Since we launched the preview for Ultra Disk Storage last September, our customers have used this capability on Azure on a wide range of workloads and have achieved new levels of performance and scale on the public cloud to maximize their virtual machine performance.

Below are some quotes from customers in our preview program:

“Ultra Disk Storage enabled SEGA to seamlessly migrate from our on-premise datacenter to Azure and take advantage of flexible performance controls.”

– Takaya Segawa, General Manager/Creative Officer, SEGA

“Ultra Disk Storage allows us to achieve incredible write performance for our most demanding PostgreSQL database workloads – giving us the ability to scale our applications in Azure.”

– Andrew Tindula, Senior IT Manager, Online Trading Academy

Ultra Disk Storage performance characteristics

Ultra Disk Storage offers sizes ranging from 4 GiB up to 64 TiB with granular increments. In addition, it is possible to dynamically configure and scale the IOPS and bandwidth on the disk independent of capacity.

Customers can now maximize disk performance by leveraging:

Up to 300 IOPS per GiB, to a maximum of 160K IOPS per disk
Up to a maximum of 2000 MBps per disk

Pricing and availability

Ultra Disk is now available in East US 2, North Europe, and Southeast Asia. Please refer to the FAQ for latest supported regions. For pricing details for Ultra Disk, please refer to the pricing page. The general availability price takes effect from October 1, 2019 unless otherwise noted. Customers in preview will automatically transition to GA pricing on this date. No additional action is required by customers in preview.

Get started with Azure Ultra Disk Storage

You can request onboarding to Azure Ultra Disk Storage by submitting an online request or by reaching out to your Microsoft representative.

13 Aug 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Management, Updates, Virtual Machines, web

Six ways we’re making Azure reservations even more powerful

New Azure reservations features can help you save more on your Azure costs, easily manage reservations, and create internal reports. Based on your feedback, we’ve added the following features to reservations:

Azure Databricks pre-purchase plans

You can now save up to 37 percent on your Azure Databricks costs when you pre-purchase Azure Databricks commit units (DBCU) for one or three years. Any Azure Databricks use deducts from the pre-purchased DBUCs automatically. You can use the pre-purchased DBCUs at any time during the purchase term.

See our documentation “Optimize Azure Databricks costs with a pre-purchase” to learn more, or purchase an Azure Databricks plan in the Azure portal.

App Service Isolated stamp fee reservations

Save up to 40 percent on your App Service Isolated stamp fee costs with App Service reserved capacity. After you purchase a reservation, the isolated stamp fee usage that matches the reservation is no longer charged at the on-demand rates. App Service workers are charged separately and don’t get reservation discount.

Visit our documentation “Prepay for Azure App Service Isolated Stamp Fee with reserved capacity“ to learn more or purchase a reservation in the Azure portal.

Automatically renew your reservations

Now you can setup your reservations to renew automatically. This ensures that you keep getting the reservation discounts without any gaps. You can opt-in to automatically renew your reservations anytime during the term of the reservation and opt-out anytime. You can also update the renewal quantity to better align with any changes in your usage pattern. To setup automatic renewal, just go to any reservation that you’ve already purchased and click on the Renewal tab.

Scope reservation to resource group

You can now scope reservations to a resource group. This feature is helpful in scenarios where same subscription has deployments from multiple cost centers, represented by their respective resource groups, and the reservation is purchased for a particular cost center. This feature helps you narrow down the reservation application to a resource group making internal charge-back easier. You can scope a reservation to a resource group at the time of purchase or update the scope after purchase. If you delete or migrate a resource group then the reservation will have to be rescoped manually.

Learn more in our documentation “Scope reservations.”

Enhanced usage data to help with charge back, savings, and utilization

Organizations rely on their enterprise agreement (EA) usage data to reconcile invoices, track usage, and charge back internally. We recently added more details to the EA usage data to make your reservation reporting easier. With these changes you can easily perform following tasks:

Get reservation purchase and refund charges
Know which resource consumed how many hours of a reservation and charge back data for the usage
Know how many hours of a reservation was not used
Amortize reservation costs
Calculate reservation savings

The new data files are available only through the Azure portal and not through the EA portal. Besides the raw data, now you can also see reservations in cost analysis.

You can visit our documentation “Get Enterprise Agreement reservation costs and usage” to learn more.

Purchase using API

You can now purchase reservations using REST APIs. The APIs below will help you get the SKUs, calculate the cost, and then make the purchase: