Azure VMware Solution - June 2023 - What's New Update

We are thrilled to announce the June 2023 releases for Azure VMware Solution. A variety of new and highly anticipated features such as Stretched Clusters and New Regions are now available.  Read on to explore more.

Azure VMware Solution Feature Updates

• AVS Stretched Clusters and CMK
• New Region: Switzerland North 
• Azure VMware Solution Webinar:  Now On-Demand 
• Network Design Guide for AVS

Azure VMware Solution Stretched Clusters and CMK

AVS Stretched Clusters with customer-managed keys 

Stretched clusters for Azure VMware Solution (AVS), now Generally Available, provide 99.99% uptime for mission critical applications that require the highest availability. Stretched clusters for AVS enable customers to focus on core application requirements and features, instead of infrastructure availability. In times of Availability Zone (AZ) failure, customers’ virtual machines (VMs) and applications automatically failover to an unaffected AZ with no application impact. 

With this release, customers can now use Customer-Managed Keys to encrypt the stretched vSAN. By default, virtual machines within vSAN datastore are protected with data-at-rest encryption using FIPS 140-2 compliant Data Encryption Key (DEK) generated for each local disk on ESXi hosts. These DEKs are encrypted by VMware vSAN Key Encryption Key (service-managed key) provided by Microsoft.  

New Azure VMware Solution Region: Switzerland North

New region available for AVS: Switzerland North

We are excited to announce that the Azure VMware Solution has gone live in North Switzerland and is now available to customers. 

With the introduction of AV36 in North Switzerland, customers will receive access to 36 cores, 2.3 GHz clock speed, 576GB of RAM, and 15.36TB of SSD storage.

Learn more about AVS regions here: Azure Products by Region | Microsoft Azure

Azure VMware Solution Webinar

A look inside Azure VMware Solution, On-Demand

We went under the hood of Azure VMware Solution with hands-on demonstrations and best practices. Our experts shared: 

• Network planning for your VMware migration demonstration. 
• Executing your migration with HCX and vMotion demonstration. 
• Connecting additional Azure services with Azure VMware Solution demonstration. 
• Day-two operations and how to optimize Azure VMware Solution. 
• Options to use existing licenses to lower your cloud costs. 

Watch the recorded session on demand.  We’ll leave you with tools and actionable tips to kickstart your VMware cloud migration. 

Azure VMware Solution Webinar | Microsoft Azure

Network Design Guides for AVS

Azure VMware Solution Landing Zone Accelerator Network Design Guide

Using this guide will walk you through the AVS networking options and what may be the best fit for your organization.  Because each decision, impacts the next it is imperative to look at all the networking choices and what fits your needs.  This recommended approach aligns with the Azure Landing Zone reference architecture. Read more on the blog post here.

The AVS Accelerator Network Design Guide can be found here to follow along with your decision making for AVS networking.

Amy Colyer

Amy Colyer - Senior Cloud Advocate | Microsoft Developer

Additional Azure VMware Solution resources:

• Homepage: Azure VMware Solution | Microsoft Azure
• Learn: Run VMware resources on Azure VMware Solution Training
• Documentation: Azure VMware Solution
• Enterprise Scale Landing Zone: Enterprise-scale for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution
  
• Partner Hub: https://AVSHub.io
• Partner Learning Resources: http://aka.ms/AVSLearningResources