Microsoft announces IaaS Technical support for Windows Azure-News Center

"Sadie Network News" April 18, according to foreign media reports, Microsoft announced that Windows Azure to provide IAAS (infrastructure services) technical support. Microsoft also disclosed a number of new features for IaaS to enhance the company's cloud platform. The timing of Microsoft's announcement was interesting, as Amazon's AWS (Amazon Web Services) summit was held in New York in Thursday.

Windows Azure's IaaS technology supports the introduction of virtual machines and virtual networking capabilities, and is now being applied in production, supported by enterprise service level agreements and supported by Microsoft Technical Support, and ready for production applications, according to Microsoft's Scott Gasri Scott Guthrie.

After the launch of the IAAS technical support for the platform, Microsoft's Azure product Marketing manager, Bill SCHILF Bill Hilf, said users no longer needed to make compromises. Users need to benefit from this cloud service without having to undo and replace existing infrastructure. They want to deploy internal investment strength and cloud flexibility. This is not only an IaaS or PAAs (platform as a service), it is an infrastructure service and platform service as well as a mix of situations.

Virtual machines and virtual networks

Virtual machines for Windows Azure are designed to provide users with the ability to deploy and run virtual machines using the Microsoft cloud Platform, or to create virtual machines from mirror libraries (including templates) or to upload existing virtual machines.

The mirrored library of Windows Azure has a number of templates for Microsoft products, including Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2008 R2 and SQL Servers, and linux-based products such as CentOS, SUSE Linux, and Ubuntu. The virtualization services that Microsoft uses in Windows Azure are expected to be Hyper-V. This feature is also provided as a built-in feature of Windows Server 2012.

With a virtual network for Windows Azure, users of this cloud platform can take advantage of some features. Users are able to create a virtual private network (VPN) that supports stable IP addresses even bypassing hardware failures, extending the internally deployed network to Windows Azure and treating the virtual machines as part of the Organization (supporting hardware that includes only Cisco and Juniper hardware), Configure client DNS servers and deploy virtual machines to a virtual network.

Other changes

Microsoft's Guthrie also disclosed that Windows Azure now supports two new virtual machine specification options, in addition to the five specifications currently available. The first is the virtual machine specification is a four kernel and 28GB memory configuration (code-named A6). The second virtual machine specification is 8 cores and 56GB memory (code-named A7). These two specifications can be selected from the virtual machine configuration menu.

Other enhancements include an increased default operating system partition size (from the previous 30GB to 127GB), an option to modify the administrator account name, and a new command-line tool (PowerShell).

New pricing Strategy

SCHILF, citing the user's "low price and high performance" requirements, spoke highly of Microsoft's commitment to make Windows Azure service at the same price as Amazon's AWS services in terms of computing, storage, and bandwidth. In terms of price cuts, Schilf said, with the official launch of the service, the price of virtual machines and cloud services was 21% to 33% cheaper than before.

The price of Windows Azure virtual machine (IaaS) has been lowered by 21%, with a 33% reduction in the price of solutions deployed using Microsoft Windows Azure Cloud Services (PaaS) mode. According to Guthrie, the new price is the same as that used by Amazon for Windows and Linux.

The A7 configured hourly rate per hour for a Windows virtual machine is $2.04 per hour and a Linux virtual machine is 1.64 dollars per hour. The A6 is configured with a Windows virtual machine of $1.02 per hour and a Linux virtual machine of $0.82 per hour. By contrast, the cheapest configuration code is Extrasmall, configured with a shared kernel and 768MB of RAM, and running Windows virtual machines and Linux virtual machines are 0.02 dollars per hour.