News from Microsoft TechEd 2014 - Key Hybrid Cloud Announcements

WOW! Brad Anderson and our Cloud & Enterprise team have made a HUGE number of announcements around Hybrid Cloud this week at Microsoft TechEd 2014. 

In this article, I’ll summarize my favorite Hybrid Cloud announcements as an IT Pro and provide links to resources with additional details to help you learn how to leverage these capabilities for your Hybrid Cloud deployments.

What was announced at TechEd 2014?

There were over 20+ new innovations announced this week at TechEd 2014.  From an IT Pro perspective, some of my favorite Hybrid Cloud announcements include:

• Azure RemoteApp
   
  Publish and deliver Windows VDI applications from the cloud to cross-platform mobile devices.
  Read more. Watch the Breakout Session.
   
• Azure Files
   
  Access Azure Storage via SMB protocol from within Azure VM’s in the same datacenter region – great for migrating existing Windows apps to the cloud that require highly durable SMB shared storage. Read more.
   
• Azure Networking Enhancements
   
  • Multi-site VPN support: Up to 10 Site-to-Site VPN connections per Virtual Network.
    Read more.
     
  • VNET-to-VNET Connectivity: Connect multiple Azure Virtual Networks together via Site-to-Site VPN, even if spanning multiple Azure datacenter regions or subscriptions. Read more.
     
  • Reserved Public IP Addresses: Reserve public IP Addresses for Azure cloud services.
    Read more.
     
  • Internal Load Balancing: Load balance across multiple VM’s inside a Virtual Network – great for multi-tier applications, SharePoint farms and ADFS on Azure. Read more.
     
  • Azure ExpressRoute: General availability of ExpressRoute for high-speed, low-latency cross-premises direct connectivity to Azure. Read more.
     
• Azure Site Recovery (formerly Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager)
   
  Provides orchestrated disaster recovery and replication of running on-premises Virtual Machines to Microsoft Azure datacenters, permitting the ability to easily leverage Azure as your disaster recovery location. Preview available in June 2014.
   
• Windows Client VMs on Azure for MSDN Subscribers
   
  Virtual machine platform images for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 8.1 are now available on the Azure Management Portal for MSDN subscribers to use for on-demand development and testing of client applications.
   
• New Azure VM Agent Extensions
   
  • Custom script: when provisioning new Virtual Machines, the custom script VM Agent extension can be used to upload and run custom provisioning scripts.
     
  • Antimalware: new VM Agent extensions provide integrated antimalware support for virtual machines via a choice of engines: Microsoft Antimalware, Trend Micro or Symantec Endpoint Protection
     
  • RDMA network drivers: specifically available for the new Compute Intensive A8 and A9 VM sizes, provides device driver access to low-latency, high speed RDMA networks that are useful when running High Performance Computing (HPC) applications, such as those using a Messaging Passing Interface (MPI). Read more.
     
• Azure Active Directory Premium Enhancements
   
  • Cloud App Discovery: discover 3rd party un-managed cloud applications that are used within your organization so that you can bring them under management control with Azure AD.
    Read more.
     
  • Azure Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) IP Whitelist: allows whitelisting of corporate IP ranges so that MFA is only required when users are outside corporate network. Read more.
     
  • Self-service Password Reset with On-Premises AD Sync: permits users to reset their Azure AD passwords via mobile phone, office phone or alternate email address.  With the latest version of DirSync, this also permits these password changes to be written back to on-premises AD when using either DirSync with Password Hashes or ADFS Federation.
    Read more.
     
  • Remote Access as a Service: delivers a scalable HTTP/HTTPS reverse application proxy platform service based on the Windows Server 2012 R2 Web Application Proxy role service, allowing organizations to securely move their DMZ to the Azure cloud. Watch the session.

We’ll be publishing articles in the near future for each of these key topic areas, so be sure to stay tuned for more details!

Where can I learn more NOW?

In the meantime, be sure to watch this breakout session that was recorded live at TechEd 2014 earlier this week by Corey Sanders and Drew McDaniel on our Azure team.

• WATCH: What’s New in Microsoft Azure IaaS

For more information …

You can find the complete list of key TechEd 2014 announcements nicely summarized at:

• TechEd 2014: Microsoft helps enterprises embrace mobile-first, cloud-first world

What are your favorite TechEd 2014 announcements?

Did I miss your favorite TechEd 2014 announcement in the list above? Share your favorites from TechEd 2014 in the Comments area below.