Microsoft Azure Cloud Works as Windows Server 2016 Recovery Platform

Customers of Microsoft’s cloud-based disaster recovery offering can now recover Windows Server 2016 workloads to Azure or another data center, the company announced today.

“Customers can now use Azure Site Recovery to replicate, protect (or migrate) their Hyper-V virtual machines hosted on a Windows Server 2016 to Azure or to a secondary site,” wrote Microsoft program manager Rajani Janaki Ram in a Nov. 28 blog post. “This week, we are announcing Azure Site Recovery’s support for protection [and] replication of virtual machines deployed” in select configurations detailed in the blog.

For example, Azure Site Recovery now supports replicating Hyper-V sites containing Windows Server 2016 hosts to Azure from local Hyper-V virtual machines (without Virtual Machine Manager). The company plans to extend support to Hyper-V sites with Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts in a future update.

Microsoft also announced today the preview release of two new diagnostics capabilities for its cloud application performance management analytics offering called Azure Application Insights (formerly Visual Studio Application Insights). First, the new Application Insights Profiler enables users to uncover the causes of application slow-downs.

“The new Application Insights Profiler runs with low overhead and will periodically enable profiling on your production service and collect detailed examples of performance traces for your application when something interesting happens,” said Dan Taylor, a senior program manager at Microsoft Azure Tools, in a Nov. 28 announcement. “This means you’ll have examples of interesting issues with detailed profiles (code-level breakdown of request execution time) for a range of issues and you’ll have the details you need to pinpoint where time is spent.”

In addition, the Application Map has been updated to display multiple components and the calls between them on the same map. Clicking on a component now displays a new error pane that provides a summary of top errors, allowing users to drill down further for more detailed information.

Meanwhile, Azure DevTest Labs, Microsoft’s cloud-based development testing solution, now supports Azure Resource Manager (ARM) templates, enabling users to better provision and manage multi-virtual-machine environments like SharePoint farms and multi-tier web applications. ARM templates can be loaded from source control repositories like GitHub or Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS) Git, explained Xiaoying Guo, senior program manager at Microsoft Azure DevTest Labs.

Over at Azure Media Services, a suite of media-streaming cloud services, Microsoft recently announced that the company is switching to a new encoding pricing model in the new year.

“For the Standard Encoder and Premium Encoder, we will be calculating usage based on the total duration of the media files produced as output by the encoder,” stated Anil Murching, a senior program Manager at Microsoft Azure Media Services, in a Nov. 23 announcement. The company is also lowering rates on Media Reserved Units used for processing videos concurrently. Examples on how to calculate the cost of encoding workloads under the new pricing model are available in this blog post.