Microsoft Announces General Availability of Windows Azure Virtual Machines & Windows Azure Virtual Networks

These infrastructure services enable you to extend your data centers and workloads into the cloud while using your existing skills and investments.

With these services, you can:

· Provision Microsoft SharePoint farms in minutes without up-front hardware investments. Integrate full-trust code to run rich apps and provide Internet-facing collaboration sites.

· Prototype your newest app or extend data marts into the cloud using Virtual Machines as a robust infrastructure for Microsoft SQL Server software. Scale on demand and connect to your on-premises infrastructure using Windows Azure Virtual Networks.

· Embrace rapid innovation using the cloud for development and test scenarios. You can spin up any test lab or sandbox quickly and be agile in your learning, development, and prototyping

Updated Windows Azure SLA

When you deploy multiple instances of Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Microsoft provides a financially backed 99.95 percent monthly service level agreement (SLA).

Validated Workloads

Microsoft's server products are validated to run on Windows Azure Virtual Machines, including Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, BizTalk Server 2013, and more. Microsoft also offers prebuilt virtual machine images-such as BizTalk Server and SQL Server-through the Windows Azure Virtual Machines Image Gallery with hourly pricing. Prebuilt Linux images-such as CentOS, Ubuntu, and Suse Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)-are available in the Image Gallery from commercial distributors. In addition, a wide variety of the most popular open source applications are available as prebuilt images in VM Depot, a self-service community portal.

Price reductions for Windows Azure Virtual Machines and Cloud Services

Microsoft has made the following changes in price. Visit our Pricing Details page for a comprehensive look at all the pricing changes.

· Windows Azure Virtual Machines general availability prices have been reduced by 21% for standard instances. New general availability prices will be effective June 1, 2013. For a small instance, the new price will be $0.09 per hour. Windows Azure Virtual Machines will remain at discounted preview prices until May 31, for standard instances.

· Linux Virtual Machines prices have been reduced by 25 percent for standard instances. Effective April 16, 2013, prices will be reduced by 25 percent for small, medium, large, and extra-large instances. For example, the price for a Linux small instance will drop from $0.08 per hour to $0.06 per hour in all geographies.

· Windows Azure Virtual Network pricing of $0.05 per hour will become effective June 1, 2013. Until June 1, customers can use Windows Azure Virtual Network free of charge.

· Windows Azure Cloud Services web and worker role prices have been reduced by 33 percent for standard instances. Effective April 17, 2013, the price will drop by 33 percent for small, medium, large, and extra-large instances. For example, the price for a small worker role will drop from $0.12 per hour to $0.08 per hour in all geographies.

· The value of 90-day free trial for MSDN and Microsoft Partner Network offers will increase. These offers will now include additional 50 hours of usage per month of our new high-memory instances. This special offer ends June 1, 2013.