
Microsoft Cost Management updates—May 2023
Whether you’re a new student, a thriving startup, or the largest enterprise, you have financial constraints, and you need to know what you’re spending, where it’s being spent, and how to plan for the future. Nobody wants a surprise when ... continue reading

Do more with less using new Azure HX and HBv4 virtual machines for HPC
This post was co-authored by Jyothi Venkatesh, Senior Product Manager, Azure HPC and Fanny Ou, Technical Program Manager, Azure HPC. The next generation of purpose-built Azure HPC virtual machines Today, we are excited to announce two new virtual machines (VMs) ... continue reading
Azure VMware Solution (AVS) for VMware Admins Primer
It’s funny to think there was such a pushback on virtualization when it first came out versus being the norm for most of us now. As a VMware admin myself, I remember all the discussions with application teams trying to ... continue reading
SDDC extension update in Windows Admin Center
Create thinly provisioned volumes in Windows Admin Center Thin provisioning is a standout feature exclusive to Azure Stack HCI 21H2 and offers flexible capacity management. With thin provisioning, storage is allocated when needed and volumes can be over-provisioned (size larger ... continue reading
Understanding Microsoft Azure Virtual Machine sizes
Having an on-premises infrastructure background, I’m used to scoping hardware by defining the specifications (CPU, memory etc) we’ll need to run the applications and expected concurrent users and allowing for some growth. Then we’d often buy a box that would ... continue reading
How does Azure Stack HCI fit into Hybrid Cloud Services?
A couple of months ago the Azure team announced a new member of the Azure Stack family called Azure Stack HCI solutions. Azure Stack HCI is a hyper-converged Windows Server 2019 cluster that uses validated hardware to run virtualized workloads ... continue reading
Controlling write-through behaviors in SMB
Heya folks, Ned here again. In my continuing series on offbeat SMB settings, today I’m going to explain how to control SMB write-through and data consistency in Windows 10 and Windows Server. Background Network protocols like SMB or NFS are ... continue reading

Azure HC-series Virtual Machines crosses 20,000 cores for HPC workloads
New HPC-targeted cloud virtual machines Azure HC-series Virtual Machines are now generally available in the West US 2 and East US regions. HC-series virtual machines (VMs) are optimized for the most at-scale, computationally intensive HPC applications. For this class of ... continue reading
Discrete Device Assignment — Guests and Linux
First published on TECHNET on Nov 24, 2015 In my previous three posts, I outlined a new feature in Windows Server 2016 TP4 called Discrete Device Assignment. This post talks about support for Linux guest VMs, and it’s more of ... continue reading
Discrete Device Assignment — Description and background
First published on TECHNET on Nov 19, 2015 With Windows Server 2016, we're introducing a new feature, called Discrete Device Assignment, in Hyper-V. Users can now take some of the PCI Express devices in their systems and pass them through ... continue reading