Why IaaS on Azure Resource Manager

It has been more than 2 years since we launched IaaS on Azure Resource Manager. Since then, we’ve been busy adding awesome features to this new stack in addition to all the features of the classic stack. Below are some of the features and benefits you get by deploying your infrastructure on Azure Resource Manager:

Compute

• Managed Disks – Simplify your storage management by exposing disks as a top level resource. In addition, Managed Disks are designed to improve the availability of your virtual machines. Learn more about the other benefits of using Managed Disks.
• Virtual machine scale sets – Provide a great blend of IaaS like control with PaaS like manageability. Scale sets allow you to reliably deploy and update a large set of virtual machines at large scale.
• Availability zones – Have peace of mind knowing that your mission critical applications can withstand datacenter-level failures.
• Instance metadata service – Provides a RESTful endpoint that allows virtual machines instances to get information regarding its compute, network, and upcoming maintenance events from within the virtual machine.
• Reserved instances – Allows reservation of virtual machines in advance, and significantly reduce costs compared to pay-as-you-go prices.
• VM sizes for more cost-effective database workloads – Enables constraining the VM vCPU count to reduce the cost of software licensing, all while maintaining the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth.

Networking

• Accelerated Networking – Allows your virtual machines to get a maximum of 30 Gbps transfer rate while providing ultra-low latency and high packet per second rates for VM to VM traffic.
• Load Balancer standard – The next generation of our existing SDN Load Balancer that allows you to design your high-performance virtual data center and support any TCP or UDP application. Use standalone VM instances, or up to 1,000 instances of virtual machine scale sets in a back-end pool. Continue to use low forwarding latency, high throughput performance, and scale to millions of flows on a fully managed Azure service.
• Virtual network peering – Enables you to seamlessly connect two Azure virtual networks. Once peered, the virtual networks appear as one for connectivity purposes. The traffic between virtual machines in the peered virtual networks is routed through the Microsoft backbone infrastructure, much like traffic is routed between virtual machines in the same virtual network, through private IP addresses only.
• Virtual network service endpoints – Extend your virtual network private address space and the identity of your VNet to the Azure services, over a direct connection. Endpoints allow you to secure your critical Azure service resources to only your virtual networks. Traffic from your VNet to the Azure service always remains on the Microsoft Azure backbone network.

Infrastructure management

• Management groups – Allows you to organize your subscriptions to help you manage access, policy, costs, and compliance across your subscriptions.
• Managed Applications – Enables you to offer cloud solutions that are easy for consumers to deploy and operate. You implement the infrastructure and provide ongoing support.
• Role based access control – Enables fine-grained access management for Azure. Using RBAC, you can grant only the amount of access that users need to perform their jobs.
• Resource locks – Give administrators the tools to lock a subscription, resource group, or resource to prevent other users in the organization from accidentally deleting or modifying critical resources.
• Resource policies – Enables you to establish conventions for resources in your organization. By defining conventions, you can control costs and more easily manage your resources. For example, you can specify that only certain types of virtual machines are allowed, or you can require that all resources have a particular tag.
• Infrastructure as Code – Azure Resource Manager templates allow you to express and easily deploy your infrastructure.
• Tags – Allow you to organize your resources by category. Each tag consists of a name and a value. For example, you can apply the name “Environment” and the value “Production” to all the resources in production.

How to get to IaaS on Azure Resource Manager

To make it easy for our customers to adopt all these exciting features, we have released a no-downtime migration service. Since this release we’ve seen many customers migrate their productions environments ranging from a few VMs to hundreds of VMs. We are continually making improvements to this service and adding additional features based on the customer feedback.

For a great video overview of the migration process, please check out Corey Sanders in the below Microsoft Mechanics episode, Azure Classic to Azure Resource Manager migration.

New features from the last year

• Migrate a virtual network with Express Route gateway.
• Migrate a virtual network with Express Route and VPN gateway.
• Enhanced Validate operation now catches various migration blockers early. Validate operation now warns about insufficient compute and networking quotas which block migration.
• Validate operation now shows information about all the resources that will be migrated.
• Key Vaults created as part of the migration have the soft-delete feature turned on. This allows you to recover the Key Vault in case of accidental deletion.

Documentation

If you’d like to get started on migrating your VMs, please review the documentation set below

• Overview of platform-supported migration of IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
• Technical deep dive on platform-supported migration from classic to Azure Resource Manager
• Planning for migration of IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
• Use PowerShell to migrate IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
• Use CLI to migrate IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
• VPN Gateway classic to Resource Manager migration
• Migrate ExpressRoute circuits and associated virtual networks from the classic to the Resource Manager deployment model
• Community tools for assisting with migration of IaaS resources from classic to Azure Resource Manager
• Common errors during Classic to Azure Resource Manager migration
• Frequently asked questions about classic to Azure Resource Manager migration