Greetings. It is my pleasure to write about the work that engineers in Windows Azure have been doing to enable our partners and customers to run and manage Linux workloads on top of Windows Azure. 

As you might have heard by now, the new Virtual Machine capability currently under Preview allows you to run Windows Server as well as Linux virtual machines on Windows Azure.

Our goal in building support for Linux is to provide a first-class experience to our customers. We know that we cannot do this alone so we are partnering with terrific companies already delivering great products for enabling Linux in the cloud.

With the Preview version of this capability, this is a journey that has just begun for us. With this release you can see the early results of our work in this area. We understand that there is a lot of work still left to do and look forward to learning from your feedback in the Linux Virtual Machines forum.

Our Partners and Their Solutions

I encourage you to visit our partner solutions page where you can find more information about the capabilities provided by our partners.

These solutions range from advanced creation and management of images and virtual machines to complete stack images with web and developer stacks ready to deploy.

Learn More

You can learn more about how to get started with Linux on Windows Azure at the following links:

• Managing Linux Virtual Machines
• Common Tasks
• How-To’s
• Other Resources

Henry Jerez, Windows Azure Senior Program Manager