As a security enhancement for Windows virtual machines we now allow, actually force, you to select a name for the administrator account. By selecting your own administrator account name it is more difficult for an attacker to guess both your administrator account name and your password. You will see this new feature in the Azure Portal when you deploy a Windows VM from either the gallery or via the Quick Create option.
The name that you provide will be used to rename the built-in administrator account. If you connect to the virtual machine using the RDP protocol you will need to select the option to enter a new username and then enter the name that you selected for the administrator name. For example if the administrator name selected was “MyAdmin” then you would configure the RDP connection like this:
Note: This warning only applies to Virtual Machines deployed prior to April 16th that are part of a availability set. Feel free to stop reading if this warning does not apply to you.
The symptom that we are trying to avoid here is an unexpected reboot of a VM. Under rare conditions you could have all VMs in an availability set reboot if you make a change to any VM in the cloud service that contains these VMs. The underlying issue is a defect that was resolved before Virtual Machines were brought out of preview; however some VMs that were deployed during the preview timeframe may still be affected.
Required conditions for a VM to be affected by this defect (VM must meet all conditions):
Resolution: If you believe that you have one or more VMs that meet the conditions described above, then all that is needed to get the VMs health again is to make any change to the cloud service that contains these VMs. The change can be any of the following operations:
You should make this change at a time when it is OK for the VMs in the cloud service to reboot. If the VM(s) were being affected by this defect then they will reboot when you make the change to the cloud service. From this point forward the defect will not affect your VMs and reboots of your VMs will only occur on configuration changes that require a reboot such as changing the size of a VM which will reboot just the VM that has the size changed.
Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines
Authors: Silvano Coriani, Jasraj Dange, Ewan Fairweather, Xin Jin, Alexei Khalyako, Sanjay Mishra, Selcin Turkarslan
Technical Reviewers: Mark Russinovich, Brad Calder, Andrew Edwards, Suraj Puri, Flavio Muratore, Hanuma Kodavalla, Madhan Arumugam Ramakrishnan, Naveen Prakash, Robert Dorr, Roger Doherty, Steve Howard, Yorihito Tada, Kun Cheng, Chris Clayton, Igor Pagliai, Shep Sheppard, Tim Wieman, Greg Low, Juergen Thomas, Guy Bowerman, Evgeny Krivosheev
Editor: Beth Inghram
Summary: Developers and IT professionals should be fully knowledgeable about how to optimize the performance of SQL Server workloads running in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services and in more traditional on-premises environments. This technical article discusses the key factors to consider when evaluating performance and planning a migration to SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. It also provides certain best practices and techniques for performance tuning and troubleshooting when using SQL Server in Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.
Read on: Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines.
This morning we released a number of great enhancements to Windows Azure. These include:
When the forums moved into specialized areas, the original forum content for Windows Azure was left archived at this link:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-GB/windowsazure/
Please see the Windows Azure Storage Team Blog for more information on Windows Azure Storage
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/
Folks,
If you are using SQL Data Sync and need to ask something related to an issue you maybe encountering, then please add the below details in your post. This helps to look at the logs and help troubleshoot instead of multiple back and forth posts.
Server id: Your server id
Region: Where your Data Sync Server is located/created
Time / Date: Date and time when you encountered the issue
Tracing Id: The tracing id you see in the message in UI
Thanks,
Mahesh
The SQL Data Sync service maintenance impacting sync groups in the US North region has been extended till 4/12 US PST. We had originally intended to complete the service maintenance activity in the region on 4/5 US PST. However, some service jobs could not be started as planned due to external factors. We are now able to restart the remainder of the maintenance jobs. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Thank you,
SQL Data Sync team
Hi all,
We will be conducting a service maintenance on the SQL Data Sync service hosting in the US North Central region from 3/28 US PST to 4/5 US PST. Sync groups in the region may encounter intermittent sync interruptions. On premise SQL Data Sync agents may go offline during the service maintenance. In the event of agents going offline, users will need to restart the offline agents after the maintenance period. Agents should be back online after the restart. Sync operations should continue as normal.
We apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused you. This service maintenance will help us to optimize the infrastructure hosting SQL Data Sync thus enabling us to better serve the needs of our customers.
Thank you for your continued interests in SQL Data Sync.
We have a User Voice site that we have been using for IIS Media Services on-premises for many years that we would like to direct our customers to post new feature requests and vote on features for Azure Media Services as well. We decided to mix the customer feature list, as many of the same feature requests will impact both our cloud and on-premises solutions for Media Services.
Please post your feature requests to our User Voice Media Services site here:
http://azuremediaservices.uservoice.com/
You can now monitor your usage of On-Demand Streaming for your media services accounts via the following three metrics that are now available via the Azure Media Services dashboard.
Streaming Data Out - Indicates how many Bytes of egress data has been used for On-Demand Streaming.
Streaming HTTP Errors - Indicates how many HTTP Errors have occured. This includes server errors (e.g. HTTP 500 caused by blob store or a media services component) as well as typical client errors (e.g. HTTP 404 or 403). In a future update we will provide additional granularity so that you can track these errors individually.
Streaming Requests - Indicates how many requests for data have been made for on-demand streaming.
If there are other metrics that you would like to see available for on-demand streaming, add the request to our uservoice board - https://azuremediaservices.uservoice.com/
We just released Windows Azure Media Services .NET SDK via Nuget: https://nuget.org/packages/windowsazure.mediaservices/
There are two versions listed there:
We also made our .NET SDK open source on Github: https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-media-services.
We will be taking contributions and if you found any issues, please report to issue tab and we will triage regularly: https://github.com/WindowsAzure/azure-sdk-for-media-services/issues?state=open.
By default every Media Services account can scale up to a max of 5 Encoding and 5 On-Demand Streaming Reserved Units. You can request a higher limit via a support ticket if your business needs are not met with 5. Note that billing will still be based on the actual number of Reserved Units you have provisioned in your account. In other words, if your max is 50 Encoding Reserved Units in your account but you scale it down to 10 you will only billed for 10.
To open a support ticket please following the instruction below
1) Log in to your Azure account at http://manage.windowsazure.com
2) Go to http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/contact/
3) Click on "Get Support"
4) Select your subscription
5) Under support type select "Technical"
6) Click on "Create Ticket"
7) Select "Windows Azure Media Services" in the product list presented on the next page
8) Select "Media Processing" as "Problem type" and then select "Reservation Units" under category
9) Click Continue
10) Follow instructions on next page and then enter details about how many Reserved Units you need and which kind (i.e. Encoding or On-Demand Streaming).
11) Click submit and you are done with opening your ticket
We have released to codeplex an open source tool that can be used for mirroring assets between two WAMS accounts. One of the primary use cases for the tool is to implement streaming redundancy across two geo-diverse data centers.
Here is the project link: https://replicator.codeplex.com/
And this is a helpful blog:WAMS Service Management APIs are now live on MSDN at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/dn167014.aspx
Feedback welcome
Please refer to my blog for breaking changes for WAMS .NET SDK GA.
http://mingfeiy.com/breaking-changes-for-windows-azure-media-services-ga/
Please let me know if you couldn't follow it to fix your code.
Starting today, January 14, 2013 the following media processors have updated version numbers and GUID identifiers. The task presets for the Windows Azure Media Encoder remain unchanged from the last update.
| Media Processor | Version | GUID |
| Storage Decryption | 1.5.3 | aec03716-7c5e-4f68-b592-f4850eba9f10 |
| Windows Azure Media Encoder | 2.2.0.0 | 70bdc2c3-ebf4-42a9-8542-5afc1e55d217 |
| Windows Azure Media Packager | 2.2.0.0 | a2f9afe9-7146-4882-a5f7-da4a85e06a93 |
| Windows Azure Media Encryptor | 2.2.0.0 | 38a620d8-b8dc-4e39-bb2e-7d589587232b |
Additionally the REST API version 1.0 will be deprecated. This means that if you are using the version 1.0 of the .Net SDK it will begin to fail. You should update immediately to the most recent version of the SDK by using the NuGet package. See the NuGet package announcement below.
Windows Azure is pleased to introduce its new multi-factor authentication service, code named Active Authentication. In addition to entering a username and password during sign in, the user is also required to authenticate with the Active Authentication app on their mobile device or via an automated phone call or text message. In order for an attacker to gain access to the user’s account, he would need to know the user’s login credentials and be in possession of the user’s phone.
See What is Windows Azure Active Authentication for more information.
The SQL Azure and Windows Azure AppFabric teams have forums setup specifically for support & feedback of their products in CTP and Labs. These forums should be reserved for conversations only while the product/feature/version is not a production release. Along with community members providing answers, these forums are supported by the product groups.
You can find these forums with the descriptions of what they cover under the Windows Azure Platform - CTPs, Betas & Labs forum category.
Currently, the Windows Azure Betas & CTPs (XS instances, VM Roles & Windows Azure Connect) are supported under the primary Windows Azure Platform forums .
Thank you,
Brian Aurich - Windows Azure Community PM
You might find this new MSDN article interesing: it compares two types of structured storage supported by Windows Azure: Windows Azure Table Storage and Windows Azure SQL Database (formerly SQL Azure). The goal of this article is to provide a comparison of the respective technologies so that you can understand the similarities and differences between them. This analysis can help you make a more informed decision about which technology best meets your specific requirements.
Check it out and please do rate the topic: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj553018.
The Windows Azure Platform Training Course includes a comprehensive set of hands-on labs and videos that are designed to help you quickly learn how to use Windows Azure, SQL Azure, and the Windows Azure AppFabric.
The Windows Azure Platform Training Course is available here and includes a link to the latest offline training kit.
Wade Wegner provides information about the September update in his blog here.
As posted on the Windows Azure Team Blog:
The Windows Azure Platform MSDN forums provide free online community support for Windows Azure and SQL Azure developers from Microsoft insiders, MVP's, and like-minded developers. The forums are a great means to get quick answers and support on all things Windows Azure without having to log a support ticket. The Windows Azure Platform forums average more than 360 new posts a month and 99% of the posted questions receive a response within one day.
To make it easier to stay on top of what's happening on the forums, you can now follow @wapforums on Twitter to keep track of new forum questions and discussions as they're posted. When you'
re logged into Twitter, you'll be able to see questions as they're asked, get community tips as they're posted and identify discussions that you may want to participate in.
And be sure to watch for posts from #MSTechTalk for tips and discussions from Microsoft engineering teams and #WAPSupport for posts related to top support questions.
Frequently Asked Questions for the Windows Azure Platform are available here:
Identity Friends:
As part of our launch today, we have updated all our documentation to help you better use our platform. We took your feedback during the Preview period and have released all new samples, walk-throughs, and API documentation. We have also consolidated all of our documentation in one area, MSDN. We are no longer spread across WindowsAzure.com and MSDN for different topics.
We will be releasing more samples as the weeks progress.
Check out the documentation here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj673460.aspx
As always, let us know what issues you find in the forums and feedback mechanism in the documentation.
Thanks!
Brandon.
The responses for WABS so far has been quite positive. Within a short amount of time, we have reached the initial capacity that we planned to auto-approve. While we were clearly not expecting such phenomenal response, it is a good problem for us to have. We are in the process of manually clearing out the pending queue. Meanwhile, if you want to speed this up for your subscription, drop an email to wabssignup@microsoft.com with a brief note on what you are intending to do. We shall try to take that up in priority.
Also go through the following BizTalk Services blog post in case you are running into any issue creating a WABS instance for yourself after your queued request has been approved.
For any issues with your usage post in this forum and we will get back to you.