If you thought there were a lot of networking updates at Microsoft Ignite, you won’t believe how many there were when it comes to Azure Compute. Here I will try to round-up those I am most excited about. Some of the features announced have been on a wish list of mine for quite a while…I’m looking at you Managed Disks!

First up, several new VM sizes have been announced. The ND and NV series has been updated in preview. This series offers powerful GPU capabilities and is now running cutting edge tech from NVIDIA.

HPC can often have several blockers on-premise but is easily workable in Azure, building on this, Microsoft have added two new ranges to the H series offering. HB an HC series will be in preview before the end of the year. These allow for staggering amounts of compute power and bandwidth.

Storage is sometimes overlooked when considering VM performance, that is something Microsoft are attempting to correct with the announcement of Ultra-SSD Managed Disks in preview. These disks will offer sub-millisecond latency, and can hit up to 160,000 iOPS on a single disk. There were no typos there, fastest disks available in any cloud.

Standard SSDs and larger sizes across the board were also announced. This allows greater flexibility in performance and cost management when designing and deploying solutions.

As mentioned earlier, my wish list item, Managed Disks can now be moved between resource groups and subscriptions. This finally allows better management and flexibility with deployments. This update allows you to also move managed images and snapshots. We had access to the private preview of this functionality and it works exactly as expected.

Not directly Compute, but important in relation to it is the announcement of Windows Virtual Desktop. Azure is already the only cloud where you can run Windows 10 workloads and this service is going to improve on the deployment and management of them. Essentially, Azure will run the RDS Gateway and Broker service for you. You will have full control and responsibility of the infrastructure this will connect too and which applications and desktops are presented. We’ve chatted to the Product Team here at Ignite and they are excited for people to get their hands on the preview and really test it out. My favourite piece of functionality is that the service will be agent-less when using Windows 10 to connect which should make deployment and adoption as painless as possible for admins!

Finally, to encourage older workload migration, Microsoft announced that if you migrate Windows Server or SQL Server 2008/R2 to Azure, you will get three years of free extended security updates on those systems. This could save you some money when Windows Server and SQL Server 2008/ R2 end of support (EOS).

So many announcements, so little time. Expect more detailed posts on most if not all of the above piece over the coming weeks and months.