Windows Azure Virtual Machine is Here!

On June 7, 2012 in San Francisco, Scott Guthrie encouraged the world to Meet the New Windows Azure . As part of this milestone, Scott announced the availability of several Windows Azure Preview Features including a new Virtual Machine capability. This exciting new Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offering makes it possible to deploy fully functional virtual machine environments in the cloud that can function independently, extend your on-premise IT environment using Virtual Networks, and interoperate with other Windows Azure cloud service offerings.

Are you interested in running SQL Server in a Windows Azure Virtual Machine? Then check out the SQL Server on Windows Azure Virtual Machine Early Adoption Cook Book at:

https://bit.ly/sqliaascookbook

It’s a work in progress and we’ll be adding lots of great stuff in the coming weeks!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    June 13, 2012
    We tried running MSSQL on a VM and found that although it worked, performance was dismal. Has this been addressed, and if so is there a KB article on how to fix performance of MSSQL on a regular VM (as opposed to Azure)?

  • Anonymous
    June 18, 2012
    This is a awesome blog post. Windows Azure is a cloud platform service which has a combinations of web sites, virtual machines, websites, cloud services, SQL database, storage and networks. Bringing everything together, Microsoft will be able to compete with companies such as Rackspace, Amazon Cloud, and etc. Virtual Machines are heavily used in the business today, it is no surprise that Microsoft has added this feature to their web service platform. In addition, the conjunction between SQL servers and Virtual Machines is a excellent move by MIcrosoft because it will allow database type tasks to run on the Virtual Machines created on the Windows Azure platform. On top of that, Microsoft data centers host and run their applications on their in-house Windows Azure cloud operating system which allows the services to run more efficiently. Lastly, the speed of Windows Azure cloud has not been tested versus the scalability of the service. Unfortunately, providing great cloud services still does not address some of the main issues of cloud computing. Since cloud computing is fairly new, there is a security uncertainty on the cloud. Secondly, there are limitations to the control users have with their service because everything is scatter through out the cloud and rare to be find anything physically.

  • Anonymous
    July 05, 2012
    @Peter, Baldwin and everybody, if you are testing your SQL workloads on Windows Azure Virtual Machine we want to hear from you.  Check out http://bit.ly/sqliaasnom for instructions on how to enroll in our managed preview.

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2012
    @Peter, running SQL Server on a VM isn't an issue with it "not working well BECAUSE it's virtualized", there are a LOT of factors to take into consideration. How was the VM configured (memory, disks, resources)? Did you configure SQL Server correctly? There's tons of companies that are running SQL Server in a virtualized environment with no issues (yes, this means production as well). One good place to start your knowledge journey is over at virtualization.sqlpass.org. PASS has tons of great community resources to help you get everything you need to know about SQL Server.

  • Anonymous
    July 11, 2012
    @Peter, running SQL Server on a VM isn't an issue with it "not working well BECAUSE it's virtualized", there are a LOT of factors to take into consideration. How was the VM configured (memory, disks, resources)? Did you configure SQL Server correctly? There's tons of companies that are running SQL Server in a virtualized environment with no issues (yes, this means production as well). One good place to start your knowledge journey is over at virtualization.sqlpass.org. PASS has tons of great community resources to help you get everything you need to know about SQL Server.