The Top 10 Things to Know When Running SQL Server Workloads on Windows Azure VMs

Greetings to my friends from SQL Server and BI land. About 18 months ago I hung up my evangelist hat and moved into a program management role on the Customer Advisory Team focusing on Windows Azure. I was asked to help engineering connect with customers who were testing their SQL Server and BI workloads on the Windows Azure Virtual Machine and Virtual Network Previews. We created a program called the Managed IaaS Preview, and enrolled a bunch of customers and partners who were interested in testing their workloads. Both of these capabilities are now generally available in an offering called Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.

During the preview, we published some of our early learnings, resources and guidance in a cook book on TechNet. Now that the services are generally available, we retired the cook book and are now pointing customers to our official documentation. If you are interested in jumping in, check out The Top 10 Things to Know When Running SQL Server Workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machines which I wrote and was just published on the Windows Azure team blog. Next up, I'll be focusing on other interesting areas in Windows Azure like making the development of scale-out applications that run at Internet scale much easier.