With all the changes in Azure, it is sometimes hard to keep track, that's why I thought I would give you a quick update on two exciting things I learned this week. In this update, I want to share a couple of things like new capabilities and benefits for the Azure Dedicated Host, NVIDIA GPU support for Azure Stack Edge, govern and manage hybrid servers using Azure Arc, and more!

New capabilities and benefits for the Azure Dedicated Host

Last year, the Azure team announced the general availability of Azure Dedicated Hosts, which provides a single-tenant physical server to run your Azure Virtual Machines for Windows Server and Linux to address specific compliance requirements while increasing visibility and control over your underlying infrastructure. This week the team released a blog post around new and recently added capabilities for the Azure Dedicated Host, which included:

Microsoft is expanding the Azure Stack Edge with NVIDIA GPU preview

Azure Stack Edge is a cloud-managed appliance that brings Azure’s compute, storage, and machine learning capabilities to the edge for fast local analysis and insights. This week the Azure Stack Edge team announced that they are expanding the Microsoft Azure Stack Edge with NVIDIA T4 Tensor Core GPU preview. With the included NVIDIA GPU, you can bring hardware acceleration to a diverse set of machine learning (ML) workloads.

Azure Stack Edge

You can learn more about Azure Stack Edge here, and read the full announcement here: Microsoft is expanding the Azure Stack Edge with NVIDIA GPU preview. You can also read more about the new Azure Stack portfolio on my blog.

Manage and govern your hybrid servers using Azure Arc

This week we also released a blog post about how you can manage and govern your Windows and Linux servers in a hybrid environment using Azure Arc. The blog post is about how you can manage your hybrid servers running on-premises or in a multi-cloud environment, and I want to give you a quick look at Azure Guest Configuration Policy.

Azure Guest Configuration Policy to Azure Arc server

Guest Configuration uses a PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) resource module to create the configuration for auditing of the Azure machines. It works with Linux and Windows machines. Think about something like group policies without the need for an Active Directory Domain, almost like Group Policies on steroids. Azure Policy Guest Configuration can not only be used to audit settings inside machines. You can also use a remediation task to change settings inside the machines.

We have a couple of built-in policies you can use, but you can also write your custom policies. For now, this was only possible with virtual machines running in Azure, but with Azure Arc, we can now use this feature for our on-premises and multi-cloud servers.

To read the full blog post, go to How to Manage and Govern Hybrid Servers with Azure Arc.

Windows Admin Center and SMS: Don’t Just Shift, Facelift!

We also had a great guest blog post from Ned Pyle, highlighting the ability of Storage Migration Service and Windows Admin Center’s new ability to create and migrate straight to new Azure VMs on the fly. These options both reduces a ton of steps and gets you into hybrid cloud computing. You can read the full blog post here on ITOpsTalk.com.

I wish you a good weekend, and I hope this short blog post provided you with some exciting news from this week. I know there is much more than just the things I listed here. I recommend that you follow the Azure announcements blog. If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment.

Also, check out last week's Az Update here.