Azure Partner Pulse: September 2021

Windows Server 2022, the next release in the long-term servicing channel is now in general availability (GA). The new release introduces advanced multi-layer security such as secured-core server, hybrid capabilities with Azure, and a flexible application platform. Software Assurance customers can take advantage of new version rights and will be able to upgrade to this latest release. To learn more and take a deep look at all the new capabilities, watch the Windows Server Summit where product experts demo the latest Windows Server security, hybrid, and app modernization capabilities. For a quick read, check out the recent announcement blog.

We also announced a new Window Server Hybrid Administrator Associate certification with two supporting exams. One of the exams will cover the administration of Windows Server hybrid core infrastructure across topics like compute, storage, identity, networking, and management tools. The other exam will focus on configuring Windows Server advanced hybrid services, coving topics such as security, migration, high availability, disaster recovery, monitoring, and troubleshooting.

In July, we announced Extended Security Updates for Windows Server 2012/ R2 - free only on Azure. Customers running 2012 releases of Windows Server and SQL Server on-premises will have the option to purchase Extended Security Updates. In addition, for customers who need more time to upgrade and modernize Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/R2, we will now provide one additional year of free extended security updates only on Azure.

The new Azure SQL Migration extension in Azure Data Studio powered by Azure Database Migration Service, now in Preview, guides customers through a simple wizard that reduces database migration complexities. The extension also performs assessments on SQL Server databases to check for Azure suitability and readiness for migrating to Azure SQL Managed Instance (PaaS) or SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines (IaaS).

For customers who purchased license-only SQL Server without Software Assurance, lack of access to Azure Hybrid Benefit can seem like a barrier to the cloud. That’s why we published this new blog highlighting how Dedicated Host helps customers move license-only SQL Server to Azure. Customers with expired SQL Annuity who acquired their SQL software before October 1, 2019 can migrate to Azure on Dedicated Host without SA and customers with newer license-only SQL Server can also purchase a software subscription for SQL Server and use Unlimited Virtualization on Azure Dedicated Host to migrate to Azure.

On September 14, Holger Bruchelt led the Unlock Critical Insights from Your SAP Data on Azure webinar, which covered how customers can derive real-time and predictive insights from their SAP data on Azure. The webinar also covered how customers can combine their SAP and non-SAP data, apply advanced data analytics, visualize insights using Power BI, and build low-code apps and workflows with Microsoft Power Platform.

Resources:

• Review the latest case study with ArcelorMittal; by migrating its SAP systems to Azure, the Luxembourg-based steel and mining company was able to achieve cost savings, increased flexibility and greater opportunities to innovate and focus on the core business
• In August, the SAP team participated in the Inside Azure for IT Ask the product experts live: SAP on Azure and Azure VMware Solution

Azure Hybrid is a key differentiator for Azure and Azure Arc presents a significant opportunity to drive net new Azure revenue, with millions of on-premises assets (Windows Server, Linux and SQL Server, and a growing Kubernetes estate) that can be managed by Azure Arc. Customers can also run Azure PaaS services such as Azure SQL, Azure PostgreSQL, and Azure application services anywhere. In addition, Azure Stack HCI and Azure Arc enable customers to modernize their datacenters with Azure consistent infrastructure. We have had several great wins and customer references over the last couple of months with SKF building the factories of the future with Azure hybrid cloud solutions, and Telstra achieving unified monitoring and security across their hybrid environments.

Resources:

• Azure Hybrid and Multicloud L100 pitch deck
• Azure Arc Jumpstart

Now partners and ISVs can offer remote app streaming as a service
Last month we announced a new pricing option for remote app streaming to enable you to use Azure Virtual Desktop to deliver applications “as-a-service” to customers and business partners. For example, this would enable software vendors to deliver their app as a SaaS solution that can be accessed by their customers. Our special promotion has no charge to access Azure Virtual Desktop to stream apps to your customers or business partners. This promotion ends on December 31, 2021, and only applies to external user access rights. Visit our web page for more details.

Product Updates:

• Windows 11 preview is now available on Azure Virtual Desktop
• GA: Screen Capture Protection for Azure Virtual Desktop
• GA: Azure Virtual Desktop is now available in the Azure China cloud
• GA: Azure AD-joined VMs support for Azure Virtual Desktop

Microsoft has the richest developer tools in the world with the Visual Studio family, GitHub, and .NET. The Microsoft Cloud includes offerings such as Azure, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, as well as our end-to-end security, identity and access management solutions. With the Microsoft Cloud, we have an incredibly comprehensive platform that developers can use to build apps and solutions to reach any person on the planet. We build products with developers in mind, which enables us to partner with our customers in their journey to support and accelerate Developer Velocity.

Resources:

• Review the report on Developer Velocity: Lessons from digital leaders accelerating business performance through software excellence
• Visit our Developer Velocity site, initiate a Quick Check with your customers, and get a comprehensive review of your customer's maturity state using the updated Developer Velocity Assessment Tool
• Story: HPE + Azure help astronauts test genomics from ISS found on Microsoft News, Azure Blog, and YouTube

Our strategic partnership with VMware brings differentiated value to Java customers modernizing their workloads on Azure and we’re strengthening our relationship with the announcement of Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise (preview). Invite customers to the Azure Spring Cloud Enterprise preview (using “Contact Me”). Enterprise brings value-added VMware Tanzu components running on fully managed Azure infrastructure and enables customers to realize the full potential of Spring and do more with their Java applications.

Resources:

• Check out our customer stories with Inlitix, Cumbria Constabulary, and Evoqua Water, and see how Morgan Stanley and Raley’s are using Azure Spring Cloud to run their mission-critical Spring Boot apps without managing infrastructure.
• Learn how to run Java EE more productively with Red Hat JBoss EAP on App Service
• Discover how to make VNETs easier to manage with App Service Environment v3 and enable redundancy in multi-tenant App Service with Availability Zones
• On-demand webinars: Accelerate Spring Boot Apps to Cloud at Scale, Securing Web Workloads with App Service Environments, and Updates on Migrating to Azure App Service

Invite your customers to the upcoming Azure Purview Digital Event, Maximize the Value of Your Data in the Cloud, on September 28. CVP Rohan Kumar will guide the audience through, demos, deep dives, major product announcements, and a Live Q&A. Understand how to create a comprehensive, automated map of an entire data estate and see how Purview works with Synapse and Power BI to deliver timely and reliable insights.

The program “Let’s Build Together | Hands-on Training Series for Azure Synapse Analytics” has completed all six live episodes and is now available on-demand

Resources:

• New case studies: HCA Healthcare, EY, NBA, Providence, Ecolab, Progressive and Text Request
• Blog on how to solve toughest business problems with analytics and machine learning and share the analytics and Azure ML whitepaper
• Learn how to unlock clinical insights with Text Analytics for health, now generally available.
• Learn how to identify sentences that best convey the main idea of a document with extractive summarization (preview), the newest feature within Text Analytics
• Explore the Q3, 2021 Forrester Wave for Cognitive Search where Azure Cognitive Search is named a leader

The new Data management and analytics scenario is now available. This includes best practice guidance for overall cloud journey and a prescriptive landing zone design, in line with best practices and design principles. It is modular and allows customers to implement different modern data platform patterns like data-mesh, data-fabric as well as traditional datalake architectures. If core recommendations are followed, the resulting target landing zone design will set the customer on a path to sustainable scale and successful adoption.

We have simplified the Ready methodology, now focused on a single target landing zone architecture referred to as the Azure Landing Zone conceptual architecture. In addition, we included the Azure Landing Zone Accelerator previously the Enterprise-scale landing zone reference implementations with a new unified experience allowing customers to quickly provision the Azure landing zone conceptual architecture. Learn more in this on-demand webinar.

And now, CAF strategy is more actionable! We developed a new template that allows customers to estimate their cost savings when leveraging Azure offers and benefits. Download this template from the Tools section of the CAF Strategy docs article and start using with your customers. You can also leverage this FinOps webinar to talk about FinOps principles as well as the Azure solutions, offers and tools that can help your customers manage their cloud environment in a financially effective way.

Resources:

• MS learn learning path on CAF
• Cloud Adoption Framework series on the Azure Enablement show
• Cloud economics webpage

Introducing the new and different Backstage Tour! We’re going behind the scenes at Azure with the Well-Architected: The Backstage Tour. Introduced by Mark Russinovich, Azure CTO, this two-hour event offers five sessions at how Azure powers the features that address each pillar of the Azure Well-Architected Framework! In this unique event, not only will attendees learn how things work behind the curtain, but they’ll also take away some tips and tricks they won’t find anywhere else to help with these subjects.

Also, check out this new blog: Join us behind the scenes at Azure, thanks to the Well-Architected Framework

Resources:

• Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework
• Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Review
• Microsoft Azure Well-Architected Framework learning path on Microsoft Learn

Check out the new Windows Server Hybrid Administrator certification - this new certification will empower professionals integrating Windows Server environments with Azure services and managing Windows Server in on-premises networks.

Windows Server IoT 2022 is now generally available. Dedicated-purpose devices have fixed functionality and are built to perform a pre-defined set of tasks. When this is the case, you can license Windows Server IoT 2022 with special dedicated use licensing terms. With Windows Server IoT 2022, customers can continue to securely run their workloads, enable new hybrid cloud scenarios, and modernize their applications to meet evolving business requirements. Windows Server IoT is an integral part of the Azure Edge Devices and Windows for IoT stack.

Resources:

• Watch the Getting Started with Azure IoT Central and the Power Platform with Eric Cheng from the Powerful Devs Conference
• Customer Story: O2matic shares how they build their IoT enabled oxygen therapy machine on Azure

• Customer Stories site for a roundup of all mixed reality case studies
• Developer resources: Help practitioners discover practical ways of visualizing and experiencing data in a 3D augmented reality environment by sharing this new Learning Path in MS Learn: Build mixed reality digital twins with Azure Digital Twins and Unity
• Get trained with the HoloLens 2 Mixed Reality training series with Unreal: Introducing HoloLens 2 Mixed Reality Production for Unreal Engine - Microsoft Tech Community

Azure VMware Solution has launched two new regions in June and July: Australia Southeast and Canada East. Both these regions are a 2nd location within their respective sovereign areas, and provide customers more options for Disaster Recovery, as they expand cloud migration initiatives. In addition, these past few months have seen some exciting feature releases by the AVS team including AVS Interconnect, Azure Storage disk pools for AVS, and VMware SRM for AVS.

Just last month, in support of our partnering and alignment with VMware, we held the first Inside Azure IT session featuring Erin Chapple, CVP Microsoft, hosting Mark Lohmeyer SVP of the cloud Business Group, VMware.

Azure HPC + AI launched the GA of FX-series and ND A100 v4 virtual machines (VMs) in June. Microsoft Azure is the first top 30 class cloud service, and NDv4 virtual machines is the fastest supercomputer in the public cloud based on June 2021 Top 500 results. Read about it in our newest whitepaper: Supercomputing performance in the cloud, which discusses the future of the cloud and includes a benchmark on ND v4 series virtual machines.

In August, we also published Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud, which examines the use of InfiniBand to enable new levels of cloud elasticity to meet emerging use cases.

We also published several case studies detailing the ways our customers are using Azure HPC + AI virtual machines, including a Jellyfish video that touches on using HBv2-series VMs to render visual effects and animation sequences and a video for Wildlife Protection Solutions, detailing their use of NV-series VMs to achieve price and performance gains.

Resources:

• Recently published case studies: Jellyfish, Wildlife Protection Solutions, Buro Happold, Van Gogh Museum
• New whitepapers: Accelerating AI and HPC in the Cloud, Supercomputing performance in the cloud
• Recently published blogs: Leveraging Azure Batch and Geospatial Open Source Standards to Map the World, Optimizing OpenFOAM Performance and Cost on Azure HBv2 VMs, Azure offers the most scalable GPU VM in the cloud with the ND A100 v4 powered by NVIDIA A100 GPUs

Azure Route Server went to GA on September 1st with new pricing page and SKU’s. The new pricing will take effect on November 1. Route Server enables network appliances to exchange route information with Azure virtual networks dynamically and allows Azure ExpressRoute and VPN gateways to automatically take the latest route information from Azure Route Server instead of manually talking to each network.

In August, the Azure Virtual Networking team released for Preview the new peering service that removed the long-standing constraint within Azure where any address space change is only allowed if the virtual network does not have any peerings.

Resources:

• Blog by Altaf Tambawala on How to re-size Azure virtual networks that are peered—now in preview
• Azure updates post on GA for Azure VPN Client for macOS
• Review new case-studies: Snowflake use of Private Link, PUMA and their utilization of Azure Virtual WAN, and Magnit and how they secure their network with ExpressRoute and Application Gateway.