Virtual Machines Archives

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:

8 Aug 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Virtual Machines

Announcing new AMD EPYC™-based Azure Virtual Machines

Microsoft is committed to giving our customers industry-leading performance for all their workloads. After being the first global cloud provider to announce the deployment of AMD EPYC™ based Azure Virtual Machines in 2017, we’ve been working together to continue bringing the latest innovation to enterprises.

Today, we are announcing our second-generation HB-series Azure Virtual Machines, HBv2, which features the latest AMD EPYC 7002 processor. Customers will be able to increase HPC performance and scalability to run materially larger workloads on Azure. We’ll also be bringing the AMD 7002 processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs to our family of cloud-based virtual desktops. Finally, our new Dav3 and Eav3-series Azure Virtual Machines, in preview today, provide more customer choice to meet a broad range of requirements for general purpose workloads using the new AMD EPYC™ 7452 processor.

Our growing Azure HPC offerings

Customers are choosing our Azure HPC offerings (HB-series) incorporating first generation AMD EPYC Naples for their performance and scalability. We’ve seen a 33 percent memory bandwidth advantage with EPYC, and that’s a key factor for many of our customers’ HPC workloads. For example, fluid dynamics is one workload in which this advantage is valuable. Azure has an increasing number of customers for whom this is a core part of their R&D and even production activities. On ANSYS Fluent, a widely used fluid dynamics application, we have measured EPYC-powered HB instances delivering a 54x performance improvement by scaling across nearly 6,000 processor cores. And this is 24 percent faster than a leading bare-metal solution with an identical InfiniBand network. Additionally, earlier this year, Azure became the first cloud to scale a tightly coupled HPC application to 10,000 cores. This is 10x higher than what had been previously possible on any other cloud provider. Azure customers will be among the first to take advantage of this capability to tackle the toughest challenges and innovate with purpose.

New HPC, general purpose, and memory optimized Azure Virtual Machines

Azure is continuing to increase its HPC capabilities, thanks in part to our collaboration with AMD. In preliminary benchmarking, HBv2 VMs featuring 120 CPUs from the second generation EPYC processor are demonstrating performance gains of over 100 percent on HPC workloads like fluid dynamics and automotive crash test analysis. HBv2 scalability limits are also increasing with the cloud’s first deployment of 200 Gigabit InfiniBand, thanks to the second generation EPYC processor’s PCIe 4.0 capability. HBv2 virtual machines (VMs) will support up to 36,000 cores for MPI workloads in a single virtual machine scale set, and up to 80,000 cores for our largest customers.

We’ll also be bringing AMD EPYC 7002 processor to our family of cloud-based remote desktops, pairing with the Radeon MI25 GPU for customers running Windows-based environments. The new series offers unprecedented GPU resourcing flexibility, giving customers more choice than ever before to size virtual machines all the way from 1/8th of a single GPU up to a whole GPU.

Finally, we are also announcing new Azure Virtual Machines as part of the Dv3 and Ev3-series—optimized for general purpose and memory intensive workloads. These new VM sizes feature AMD’s EPYC™ 7452 processor. The new general purpose Da_v3 and Das_v3 Azure Virtual Machines provide up to 64 vCPUs, 256 GiBs of RAM, and 1,600 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage. Additionally, the new memory optimized Ea_v3 and Eas_v3 Azure Virtual Machines provide up to 64 vCPUs, 432 GiBs of RAM, and 1,600 GiBs of SSD-based temporary storage. Both VM series support Premium SSD disk storage. The new VMs are currently in preview in the East US Azure region and with availability coming soon to other regions.

Da_v3 and Das_v3 virtual machines can be used for a broad range of general-purpose applications. Example use cases include most enterprise-grade applications, relational databases, in-memory caching, and analytics. Applications that demand faster CPUs, better local disk performance or higher memories can also benefit from these new VMs. Additionally, the Ea_v3 and Eas_v3 VM series are optimized for other large in-memory business critical workloads.

Taking advantage of these new offerings

Request access to the latest HPC and Remote Desktop virtual machines.
Request access to the new general purpose and memory intensive Azure Virtual Machines.

2 Aug 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Hybrid, Virtual Machines

Introducing Azure Dedicated Host

We are excited to announce the preview of Azure Dedicated Host, a new Azure service that enables you to run your organization’s Linux and Windows virtual machines on single-tenant physical servers. Azure Dedicated Hosts provide you with visibility and control to help address corporate compliance and regulatory requirements. We are extending Azure Hybrid Benefit to Azure Dedicated Hosts, so you can save money by using on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance or qualifying subscription licenses. Azure Dedicated Host is in preview in most Azure regions starting today.

You can use the Azure portal to create an Azure Dedicated Host, host groups (a collection of hosts), and to assign Azure Virtual Machines to hosts during the virtual machine (VM) creation process.

Visibility and control

Azure Dedicated Hosts can help address compliance requirements organizations may have in terms of physical security, data integrity, and monitoring. This is accomplished by giving you the ability to place Azure VMs on a specific and dedicated physical server. This offering also meets the needs of IT organizations seeking host-level isolation.

Azure Dedicated Hosts provide visibility over the server infrastructure running your Azure Virtual Machines. They allow you to gain further control over:

The underlying hardware infrastructure (host type)
Processor brand, capabilities, and more
Number of cores
Type and size of the Azure Virtual Machines you want to deploy

You can mix and match different Azure Virtual Machine sizes within the same virtual machine series on a given host.

With an Azure Dedicated Host, you can control all host-level platform maintenance initiated by Azure (e.g., host OS updates). An Azure Dedicated Host gives you the option to defer host maintenance operations and apply them within a defined maintenance window, 35 days. During this self-maintenance window, you can apply maintenance to your hosts at your convenience, thus gaining full control over the sequence and velocity of the maintenance process.

Licensing cost savings

We now offer Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and SQL Server on Azure Dedicated Hosts, making it the most cost-effective dedicated cloud service for Microsoft workloads.

Azure Hybrid Benefit allows you to use existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance, or qualifying subscription licenses, to pay a reduced rate on Azure services. Learn more by referring to the Azure Hybrid Benefit FAQ.
We are also expanding Azure Hybrid Benefit so you can take advantage of unlimited virtualization for Windows Server and SQL Server with Azure Dedicated Hosts. Customers with Windows Server Datacenter licenses and Software Assurance can use unlimited virtualization rights in Azure Dedicated Hosts. In other words, you can deploy as many Windows Server virtual machines as you like on the host, subject only to the physical capacity of the underlying server. Similarly, customers with SQL Server Enterprise Edition licenses and Software Assurance can use unlimited virtualization rights for SQL Server on their Azure Dedicated Hosts.
Consistent with other Azure services, customers will get free Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2008/R2 and SQL Server 2008/R2 on Azure Dedicated Host. Learn more about how to prepare for SQL Server and Windows Server 2008 end of support.

Azure Dedicated Hosts allow you to use other existing software licenses, such as SUSE or RedHat Linux. Check with your vendors for detailed license terms.

With the introduction of Azure Dedicated Hosts, we’re updating the outsourcing terms for Microsoft on-premises licenses to clarify the distinction between on-premises/traditional outsourcing and cloud services. For more details about these changes, read the blog “Updated Microsoft licensing terms for dedicated hosted cloud services.” If you have any additional questions, please reach out to your Microsoft account team or partner.

Getting started

The preview is available now. Get started with your first Azure Dedicated Host.

You can deploy Azure Dedicated Hosts with an ARM template or using CLI, PowerShell, and the Azure portal. For a more detailed overview, please refer to our website and the documentation for both Windows and Linux.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Which Azure Virtual Machines can I run on Azure Dedicated Host?

A: During the preview period you will be able to deploy Dsv3 and Esv3 Azure Virtual Machine series. Support for Fsv2 virtual machines is coming soon. Any virtual machine size from a given virtual machine series can be deployed on an Azure Dedicated Host instance, subject to the physical capacity of the host. For additional information please refer to the documentation.

Q: Which Azure Disk Storage solutions are available to Azure Virtual Machines running on an Azure Dedicated Host?

A: Azure Standard HDDs, Standard SSDs, and Premium SSDs are all supported during the preview program. Learn more about Azure Disk Storage.

Q: Where can I find pricing and more details about the new Azure Dedicated Host service?

A: You can find more details about the new Azure Dedicated Host service on our pricing page.

Q: Can I use Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server/SQL Server licenses with my Azure Dedicated Host?

A: Yes, you can lower your costs by taking advantage of Azure Hybrid Benefit for your existing Windows Server and SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance or qualifying subscription licenses. With Windows Server Datacenter and SQL Server Enterprise Editions, you get unlimited virtualization when you license the entire host and use Azure Hybrid Benefit. As a result, you can deploy as many Windows Server virtual machines as you like on the host, subject to the physical capacity of the underlying server. All Windows Server and SQL Server workloads in Azure Dedicated Hosts are also eligible for free Extended Security Updates for Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/R2.

Q: Can I use my Windows Server/SQL Server licenses with dedicated cloud services?

A: In order to make software licenses consistent across multitenant and dedicated cloud services, we are updating licensing terms for Windows Server, SQL Server, and other Microsoft software products for dedicated cloud services. Beginning October 1, 2019, new licenses purchased without Software Assurance and mobility rights cannot be used in dedicated hosting environments in Azure and certain other cloud service providers. This is consistent with our policy for multitenant hosting environments. However, SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance can continue to use their licenses on dedicated hosts with any cloud service provider via License Mobility, even if licenses were purchased after October 1, 2019. Customers may use on-premises licenses purchased before October 1, 2019 on dedicated cloud services. For more details regarding licensing, please read the blog “Updated Microsoft licensing terms for dedicated hosted cloud services.”

For additional information, please refer to the Azure Dedicated Host website and the Azure Hybrid Benefit page.

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

Accessing virtual machines behind Azure Firewall with Azure Bastion

Azure Virtual Network enables a flexible foundation for building advanced networking architectures. Managing heterogeneous environments with various types of filtering components, such as Azure Firewall or your favorite network virtual appliance (NVA), requires a little bit of planning.

Azure Bastion, which is currently in preview, is a fully managed platform as a service (PaaS) that provides secure and seamless remote desktop protocol (RDP) and secure shell (SSH) access to your virtual machines (VMs) directly through the Azure portal. Azure Bastion is provisioned directly in your virtual network, supporting all VMs attached without any exposure through public IP addresses.

When you deploy Azure Firewall, or any NVA, you invariably force tunnel all traffic from your subnets. Applying a 0.0.0.0/0 user-defined route can lead to asymmetric routing for ingress and egress traffic to your workloads in your virtual network.

While not trivial, you often find yourself creating and managing a growing set of network rules, including DS NAT, forwarding, and so on, for all your applications to resolve this. Although this can impact all your applications, RDP and SSH are the most common examples. In this scenario, the ingress traffic from the Internet may come directly to your virtual machine within your virtual network, but egress traffic will end up going to the NVA. Since most NVAs are stateful, it ends up dropping this traffic as it did not initially receive it.

Azure Bastion, allows for simplified set up of RDP/SSH to your workloads within virtual networks containing stateful NVAs or Azure Firewall with force tunneling enabled. In this blog, we will look at how to make that work seamlessly.

For a reference on how to deploy Azure Bastion (preview) in your virtual network, please see the documentation “Create an Azure Bastion host (Preview).”
To learn how to implement Azure Firewall in your virtual network, refer to the documentation “Deploy and configure Azure Firewall using the Azure portal.”

Having deployed both Azure Bastion and Azure Firewall in your virtual network, let us look at how you can configure Azure Bastion to work in this scenario.

Configuring Azure Bastion

When deploying Azure Firewall, or a virtual appliance, you may end up associating your RouteTable, which was created while deploying Azure Firewall, to all subnets in your virtual network. You may even be including the AzureBastionSubnet subnet as well.

This applies a user-defined route to the AzureBastionSubnet subnet which directs all Azure Bastion traffic to Azure Firewall, thereby blocking traffic required for Azure Bastion. To avoid this, configuring Azure Bastion is very easy, but do not associate the RouteTable to AzureBastionSubnet subnet.

As you would have noticed above, myRouteTable is not associated with the AzureBastionSubnet, but with other subnets like Workload-SN.

The AzureBastionSubnet subnet is secure platform managed subnet, and no other Azure Resource can deploy in this subnet except Azure Bastion. All connections to Azure Bastion are enforced through the Azure Active Directory token-based authentication with 2FA, and all traffic is encrypted/over HTTPS.

Azure Bastion is internally hardened and allows traffic only through port 443, saving you the task of applying additional network security groups (NSGs) or user-defined routes to the subnet.

With this, the RDP/SSH requests will land on Azure Bastion. Configured using the example above, the default route (0.0.0.0/0) does not apply to AzureBastionSubnet as it’s not associated with this subnet. Based on the incoming RDP/SSH requests, Azure Bastion connects to your virtual machines in other subnets, like Workload-SN, which do have a default route associated. The return traffic from your virtual machine will go directly to Azure Bastion, instead of going to the NVA, in your virtual network as the return traffic is directed to a specific private IP in your virtual network. The specific private IP address in your virtual network makes it a more specific route and hence, takes precedence over the force-tunnel route to the NVA, making your RDP/SSH traffic work seamlessly with Azure Bastion when a NVA or Azure Firewall is deployed in your virtual network.

We are grateful and appreciate the engagement and excitement of customers and community and are looking forward to your feedback in further improving the service and making it generally available soon.

10 Jul 2019
By editor
Categories: Azure, Cloud Strategy, Virtual Machines

CGG speeds geoscience insights on Azure HPC

A leader in geosciences, CGG has been imaging the earth’s subsurface for more than 85 years. Their products and solutions help clients locate natural resources. When a customer asked whether the cloud could speed the creation of the high-resolution reservoir models that they needed, CGG turned to Azure high performance computing (HPC).

CGG is a team of acknowledged imaging experts in the oil and gas industry. Their subsurface imaging centers are internationally acclaimed, and their researchers are regularly recognized with prestigious international awards for their outstanding technical contributions to the industry. CGG was an early innovator in seismic inversion, the technique of converting seismic survey reflection data into a quantitative description of the rock properties in an oil and gas reservoir. From this data, highly detailed models can be made, like the following image showing the classification of rock types in a 3D grid for an unconventional reservoir interval. These images are invaluable in oil and gas exploration. Accurate models help geoscientists reduce risk, drill the best wells, and forecast production better.

The challenge is to get the best possible look beneath the surface. The specialized software is compute-intensive, and complex models can take hours or even days to render.

Figure 1. An advanced seismic model, using CGG’s Jason RockMod.

Azure provides the elasticity of compute that enables our clients to rapidly generate multiple high-resolution rock property realizations with Jason RockMod for detailed reservoir models.”

– Joe Jacquot, Strategic Marketing Manager, CGG GeoSoftware

The challenge: prove it in the cloud

An oil and gas company in Southeast Asia asked CGG to work with them to find the optimum way to deploy reservoir characterization technology for their international team. The customer also wondered if they could take advantage of the cloud to save on hardware costs in their datacenter, where they already ran leading-edge CGG geoscience software solutions. They knew the theory of the cloud’s elasticity and on-demand scalability were familiar with its use in oil exploration, but they didn’t know if their applications would perform as well in the cloud as they did on-premises.

In a rapidly moving industry, performance gains translate to speedier decision making, accelerated exploration, and development timelines, so the company asked CGG to provide a demonstration. As geoscience experts, CGG wanted to show their software in the best possible light. They turned to the customer advisors at AzureCAT (led by Tony Wu) for help creating a proof of concept that demonstrated how the cloud capacity could help the company get insights faster.

Demo 1: CGG Jason RockMod

CGG Jason RockMod overcomes the limitations of conventional reservoir characterization solutions with a geostatistical approach to seismic inversion. The outcome is accurate reservoir models so in depth that geoscientists can use them to predict field reserves, fluid flow patterns, and future production.

The company wanted to better understand the scale of the RockMod simulation in the cloud, and wondered whether the cloud offered any real benefits compared to running the simulations on their own workstations.

Technical teams from CGG and AzureCAT looked at RockMod as a big-compute workload. In this type of architecture, computationally intensive operations such as simulations are split across CPUs in multiple computers (10 to 1,000s). A common pattern is to administer a cluster of virtual machines, then schedule and monitor the HPC jobs. This do-it-yourself approach would enable the company to set up their own cluster environment in Azure virtual machine scale sets. The number of VM instances can automatically scale per demand or on a defined schedule.

RockMod creates a family of multiple equi-probable simulation outputs, called realizations. In the proof of concept tests for their customer, CGG ran RockMod on a Microsoft Windows virtual machine on Azure. It served as the master node for job scheduling and distribution of multiple realizations across several Linux-based HPC nodes in a virtual machine scale set. Scale sets support up to 1,000 VM instances or 300 custom VM images, more than enough scale for multiple realizations.

An HPC task generates the realizations, and the speed depends on the number of CPU cores or non-hyperthreading more than the processor speed. AzureCAT recommended non-hyperthreading cores as the best choice for application performance. From a storage perspective, the realizations are not especially demanding. During testing, the storage IO rate went up to a few hundred megabytes per second (MB/s). Based on these considerations, CGG chose the cost-effective DS14V2 virtual machine with accelerated networking, which has 16 cores and 7 GB per core.

“Azure provided the ideal blend of HPC and storage performance and price, along with technical support that we needed to successfully demonstrate our high-end reservoir characterization technology on the cloud. It was a technical success and paved the way for full-scale commercial deployment.”

– Joe Jacquot, Strategic Marketing Manager, CGG GeoSoftware

Figure 2. Azure architecture of CGG Jason RockMod.

Benchmarks and benefits

A typical project is about 15 GB in size and includes more than three million seismic data traces. Some of the in-house workstations could render a single realization within a day or two, but the goal was to run 30 realizations by taking advantage of the cloud’s scalability. The initial small scale test ran one realization on one HPC node, which took just under 12 hours to complete. That was within the target range, and now the CGG team needed to see what would happen when they ran at scale.

To test the linear scalability of the job, they first ran eight realizations on eight nodes. The results were nearly identical to the small scale test run. The one realization to one node formula seemed to work. For the sake of comparison, they tried running 30 realizations on just eight nodes. That didn’t work so well, the tests were nearly four times slower.

The final test ran 30 realizations on 30 nodes, one realization to one node. The results were similar to the small scale test, and the job was completed in just over 12 hours. This scenario was tested several times to validate the results which were consistent. The test was a success.

Demo 2: CGG InsightEarth

In their exploration and development efforts, the company also used CGG InsightEarth, a software suite that accelerates 3D interpretation and visualization.

The interpretation teams at the company were using several InsightEarth applications to locate hydrocarbon deposits, faults and fractures, and salt bodies all of which can be difficult to interpret. They asked CGG to compare the performance of the InsightEarth suite on Azure to their workstations on premises. Their projects were typically 15 GB in size, with more than three million seismic data traces.

InsightEarth is a powerful, memory-intensive application. To get the best performance, the application must run on a GPU-based computer, and to get the best performance from GPUs, efficient memory access is critical. To meet this requirement on Azure, the team of engineers from CGG and AzureCAT looked at the specialized, GPU-optimized VM sizes that are available. The Azure NV-series virtual machines are powered by NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs and the NVIDIA GRID technology with Intel Broadwell CPUs, which are suited for compute-intensive visualizations and simulations.

The GRID license gives the company the flexibility to use an NV instance as a virtual workstation for a single user, or to give 25 users concurrent access to the VM running InsightEarth. The company wanted the collaborative benefits of the second model. Unlike a physical workstation, a cloud-based GPU virtual workstation would allow them all to view the data after running a pre-processing or interpretation step because all the data was in the cloud. This would streamline their workflow, eliminating the need to move the data back on premises for that task.

The initial performance tests ran InsightEarth on an NV24 VM on Azure. The storage IO demand was moderate, with rates around 100 MB/s. However, the VM’s memory size proved to be a bottleneck. The amount of data that could be loaded from the memory was limited, and the performance wasn’t as good as the more powerful GPU setup used on premises.

Next, the team ran a similar test using an ND-series VM. This type is specifically designed to offer excellent performance for AI and deep learning workloads, where huge data volumes are used to train models. They chose an ND24-size VM with double the amount of the memory and the newer NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs. This time, the results were considerably better than NV24.

From an infrastructure perspective, storage also matters when deploying high-performance applications on Azure. The team implemented SoftNAS, a type of storage that supports both the Windows and Linux VMs used in the overall solution. SoftNAS also suits the lower to mid-range storage IO demands for these simulation and interpretation workloads.

Figure 3. Azure Architecture for InsightEarth

Summary

GPUs and memory-optimized VMs provided the performance that the company needed for both Jason Rockmod and InsightEarth. Better yet, Azure gave them the scale they needed to run multiple realizations in parallel. In addition, they deployed GPUs to both software solutions, giving the CGG engineers a standard front end to work with. They set up access to the Azure resources through an easy-to-use portal based on Citrix Cloud, which also runs on Azure.

CGG’s customer, the oil and gas company, was delighted with the results. Based on the results of the benchmark tests, the oil and gas company decided to move all of their current CGG application workload to Azure. The cloud’s elasticity and Azure’s pay-per-use model were a compelling combination. Not only did the Azure solution perform, it proved to be more cost-effective compared to the limited scalability they could achieve with their computing power on-premises.

Company:	CGG
Microsoft Azure CAT Technical Lead:	Tony Wu

27 Jun 2019
By editor
Categories: Announcements, Azure, Virtual Machines

Announcing the general availability of Azure premium files

Highly performant, fully managed file service in the cloud!

Today, we are excited to announce the general availability of Azure premium files for customers optimizing their cloud-based file shares on Azure. Premium files offers a higher level of performance built on solid-state drives (SSD) for fully managed file services in Azure.

Premium tier is optimized to deliver consistent performance for IO-intensive workloads that require high-throughput and low latency. Premium file shares store data on the latest SSDs, making them suitable for a wide variety of workloads like databases, persistent volumes for containers, home directories, content and collaboration repositories, media and analytics, high variable and batch workloads, and enterprise applications that are performance sensitive. Our existing standard tier continues to provide reliable performance at a low cost for workloads less sensitive to performance variability, and is well-suited for general purpose file storage, development/test, backups, and applications that do not require low latency.

Through our initial introduction and preview journey, we’ve heard from hundreds of our customers from different industries about their unique experiences. They’ve shared their learnings and success stories with us and have helped make premium file shares even better.

“Working with clients that have large amounts of data that is under FDA or HIPAA regulations, we always struggled in locating a good cloud storage solution that provided SMB access and high bandwidth… until Azure Files premium tier. When it comes to a secure cloud-based storage that offers high upload and download speeds for cloud and on-premises VM clients, Azure premium files definitely stands out.”

– Christian Manasseh, Chief Executive Officer, Mobius Logic

“The speeds are excellent. The I/O intensive actuarial CloudMaster software tasks ran more than 10 times faster in the Azure Batch solution using Azure Files premium tier. Our application has been run by our clients using 1000’s of cores and the Azure premium files has greatly decreased our run times.”

– Scott Bright, Manager Client Data Services, PolySystems

Below are the key benefits of the premium tier. If you’re looking for more technical details, read the previous blog post “Premium files redefine limits for Azure Files.”

Performant, dynamic, and flexible

With premium tier, performance is what you define. Premium file shares’ performance can instantly scale up and down to fit your workload performance characteristics. Premium file shares can massively scale up to 100 TiB capacity and 100K IOPS with a target total throughput of 10 GiB/s. Not only do premium shares include the ability to dynamically tune performance, but also offer bursting capability to meet highly variable workload requirements with short peak periods of intense IOPS.

“We recently migrated our retail POS microservices to Azure Kubernetes Service with premium files. Our experience has been simply amazing – premium files permitted us to securely deploy our 1.2K performant Firebird databases. No problem with size or performance, just adapt the size of the premium file share to instantly scale. It improved our business agility, much needed to serve our rapidly growing customer base across multiple retail chains in France.”

– Arnaud Le Roy, Chief Technology Officer, Menlog

We partnered with our internal Azure SQL and Microsoft Power BI teams to build solutions on premium files. As a result, Azure Database for PostgreSQL and Azure Database for MySQL recently opened a preview of increased scale of 16 TiB databases with 20,000 IOPS powered by premium files. Microsoft Power BI announced a powerful 20 times faster enhanced dataflows compute engine preview built upon Azure Files premium tier.

Global availability with predictable cost

Azure Files premium tier is currently available in 19 Azure regions globally. We are continually expanding regional coverage. You can check the Azure region availability page for the latest information.

Premium tier provides the most cost-effective way to create highly-performant and highly-available file shares in Azure. Pricing is simple and cost is predictable–you only pay a single price per provisioned GiB. Refer to the pricing page for additional details.

Seamless Azure experience

Customers receive all features of Azure Files in this new offering, including snapshot/restore, Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Backup integration, monitoring, hybrid support via Azure File Sync, Azure portal, PowerShell/CLI/Cloud Shell, AzCopy, Azure Storage Explorer support, and the list goes on. Developers can leverage their existing code and skills to migrate applications using familiar Azure Storage client libraries or Azure Files REST APIs. The opportunities for future integration are limitless. Reach out to us if you would like to see more.

With the availability of premium tier, we’re also enhancing the standard tier. To learn more, visit the onboarding instructions for the standard files 100 TiB preview.

Get started and share your experiences

It is simple and takes two minutes to get started with premium file shares. Please see detailed steps for how to create a premium file share.

Visit Azure Files premium tier documentation to learn more. As always, you can share your feedback and experiences on the Azure Storage forum or email us at [email protected]. Post your ideas and suggestions about Azure Storage on our feedback forum.