The following are rolling updates from me personally, first and foremost for my interest and reference, secondly for anyone else that cares to read it. They are update snipits. Please note, I have done the quick and dirty and copy and pasted some of it directly from Microsoft sites and I’ve included links. It’s raw but updated in my own real time as I see updates come through from Ignite.
SharePoint Document Libraries can now be sync’ed again with a brand new OneDrive for Business sync client. About time, I was waiting for this one! Bit of a dodgy setup using a .reg file, but it seems to work – so far.
Get started syncing SharePoint sites with the new OneDrive sync client – Preview.
Azure DNS
Similar to Route 56 in AWS, today sees the GA release of Azure DNS. You can now host domains in Azure DNS and manage DNS records using the same credentials, APIs, tools, billing and support as other Azure services. Azure DNS also benefits from Azure Resource Manager’s enterprise-grade security features, enabling role-based access control and detailed audit logs. Azure DNS supports multiple record types including, A, AAAA, CNAME, MX, NS, PTR, SOA, SRV and TXT and comes with a 99.99% availability SLA.
Active-Active Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway
New Active-Active Virtual Private Network (VPN) Gateway for the High-Performance VPN gateway SKU is recommended for production workloads. Availability requires a complete end to end perspective that includes the your on-premises VPN devices and using different service providers to connect to the Active-Active VPN gateway. Each VPN gateway has two active instances. You can now implement dual redundancy for cross-premises VPN connections, increasing the availability of their VPN connections to their Azure VNets. You should consider adopting the new Active-Active VPN Gateway.
Courtesy: Microsoft
Ultra-Performance ExpressRoute Gateway
Introducing the UltraPerformance Gateway SKU for ExpressRoute that supports up to 10 Gbps throughput. This is a 5x improvement over the existing ExpressRoute HighPerformance gateway with a 99.95% availability SLA. With the UltraPerformance Gateway, you can deploy even more networking intensive services and workloads into their virtual networks.
IPv6
Azure now supports Native IPv6 network connectivity for applications and services hosted on Azure Virtual Machines. The demand for IPv6 has never been greater with the explosive growth in mobile devices, billions of Internet of Things (IOT) devices entering the market, along with new compliance regulations. IPv6 has been used by internal Microsoft services such as Office 365 for over three years. We are now offering this feature to all Azure customers. Native IPv6 connectivity to the virtual machine is available for both Windows and Linux VMs.
vNet peering
Announcing the general availability of Virtual Network Peering (VNet Peering). VNet Peering connects two Virtual Networks (VNets) in the same region, enabling direct full mesh connectivity. VMs in the peered VNets communicate with each other as if they are part of the same VNet, thus benefiting from high bandwidth and low latency. Hub & Spoke topologies are supported with Transit Routing through gateways. The VNet without a gateway still has cross-premises connectivity via the gateway in the peered VNet. VNet Peering works across subscriptions in the same region allowing for simplified service management.
Azure Network Improvements
Announcing break-through advancements to our entire global server fleet that will improve networking bandwidth performance 33% to 50%. This is achieved by utilising hardware technologies such as NVGRE offload which harnesses the network processing capabilities of the hardware. Windows and Linux VMs will experience these performance improvements while returning valuable CPU cycles to the application. Our world-wide deployment will complete in 2016 and once completed we will update our VM Sizes table to reflect these new performance benefits.
The Public Preview of Accelerated Networking. Accelerated Networking provides up to 25Gbps of throughput and drastically reduces network latency up to 10x Applications will benefit from a new generation of hardware technologies including SR-IOV, allowing VMs to communicate directly to the hardware NIC completely bypassing the Hypervisor’s virtual switch. More details on regional availability and a link to sign up for the preview are available at Accelerated Networking for a virtual machine.
New compute-intensive workload Azure VMs. The Availability of H-series VMs in Microsoft Azure.
- Available in six different sizes, H8, H16, H8m, H16m, H16r, H16mr (m: High Memory, r: RDMA network)
- based on Intel E5-2667 V3 3.2 GHz (with turbo up to 3.5 GHz) processor technology
- utilising DDR4 memory
- SSD-based local storage
- a dedicated RDMA backend network enabled by FDR InfiniBand network capable of delivering ultra-low latency. RDMA networking is dedicated for MPI (Message Passing Interface) traffic when running tightly coupled applications.
Marc Kean 