Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) offers subscribers persistent VMs running production workloads of Windows Server, Linux, and (in certain scenarios) Windows client OSs. Organizations can provision VMs with required computing resources, and the subscriber is responsible for the deployment, maintenance, and management of all software within the VM. Azure VMs offer an alternative to running Microsoft’s Hyper-V or solutions from VMware or other vendors on-premises, and the service competes with Amazon Web Services EC2 and VMware Cloud on AWS, and Google’s Compute Engine hosted services.

Service Overview

Azure VMs enable organizations to deploy VMs in Azure and optionally take advantage of Azure’s geographic breadth, redundancy, and autoscaling capabilities. Azure VMs will likely make the most sense to an organization looking to reduce investments in additional hardware or datacenters in situations like the following:

Disaster recovery. Organizations with limited capital may want to add a layer of disaster recovery to their infrastructure without investing in on-premises resources. Azure VMs can provide disaster recovery for many Windows Server workloads using backup tools or Azure Site Recovery (ASR). ASR is a separate service (with additional costs) that can replicate VMs from on-premises to Azure and between Azure regions. Some server applications such as SQL Server can also provide disaster recovery directly to the same software running within Azure VMs.