Azure portal updates: March 2018

Since the beginning of the year, the Azure portal team has deployed hundreds of updates to help you manage your compute, network and storage resources more securely, quickly and easily. VM-related improvements we’ve rolled out in the past month include:

• Improved logic for the VM Connect button. We improved the logic that’s used to generate the RDP file when you’re connecting to a Windows virtual machine:

  • If your VM has a public IP address, the RDP file will be generated with the DNS name, load balancer IP address or public IP address, in that order.

  • If your VM does not have a public IP address, the RDP file will be generated to connect to the private IP address on the VM. This is useful if you have an Azure ExpressRoute or VPN connection to the VM’s virtual network.   

• Adding a network interface to an existing VM. You can now use the portal to add a network interface to an existing VM from the Networking blade. You can add an existing NIC or create a new one. 

• NSG warnings for publicly exposed ports. On the Networking blade, you now see a warning icon next to network security group rules that may expose your virtual machine to unwanted access from the Internet.