More on Azure Announcements at TechEd

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Todd Sweetser

Hi Cloud Sellers!

There were many announcements at TechEd regarding Azure. Enhancements of current capabilities as well as new functionality that continue to make the Microsoft Azure toolset more and more powerful!

My colleague Jeff Stoffel wrote a blog post on the new capabilities around Virtual Networking, General availability of the two most requested features for Azure Virtual Networks, Multiple site-to-site and VNET-to-VNET connectivity. On this post I will share some of the other capabilities that our SMB partners can see benefits from.

First up is Azure RemoteAPP! This is a new service that will deliver remote applications directly from Azure without requiring the full implementation of an RDS infrastructure (on premises or in Azure VMs.) Users will be able to use the Remote Desktop Client on their workstation to connect and run applications from Azure. This offering is currently in preview and there is no cost to try it while in preview. See more info on the Azure RemoteApp website. Do note that this will enable RemoteApp functionality, if you require full Desktop access the option of running RDS in Azure VMs is still viable! (See colleague Tim Tetrick’s post on this topic here: Offering RDS solutions on Microsoft Azure.) 

Next up is Azure Site Recovery! This is formally known as Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager. Also to be available in preview in June, this is will enable customers to replicate virtual machines from their primary site directly to Azure, instead of a second customer site. Stay tuned for more info when this is made available via the public preview.

Final one I will speak to today is that if you have an MSDN subscription, you can now spin up a Windows Client VM! You can now access VM images of Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 via the VM gallery as shown below:

image

Note that the MSDN option is checked on lower left. While not supported for production, this allows one to develop and test applications in Windows client operating systems quickly and easily!

For a full list of announcements see the post TechEd 2014 North America Announcement Summary. Stay tuned for future posts for more detail on other announcements!

Thanks, and good selling!