Microsoft announced on June 7th that Windows Azure will be enhanced to include several infrastructure-as-a-service offerings including Windows Azure Virtual Machines, Virtual Networks, Web Sites and Media Services. These new offerings provide increased flexibility when planning your Private Cloud infrastructure through the introduction of Hybrid scenarios.
Windows Azure Virtual Machines provide the flexibility to inexpensively run Windows and Linux workloads with a variety of resource sizes (ie., Small, Medium, Large, XLarge VMs). In addition, the new Windows Azure Virtual Networking capabilities permit IT professionals to create secure site-to-site VPNs from their datacenters to the VMs they are running in the Azure cloud with no changes to underlying IP addressing. The resulting benefits provide the ability to quickly and securely extend your on-premises datacenter with elastic cloud resources while maintaining a single management toolset, Microsoft System Center, for managing both on-premises and cloud-based VM workloads. This flexibility is ideal for hybrid scenarios that involve the need for some application components to burst temporarily with additional compute resources or involve Internet-facing components that would otherwise be expensive and difficult for a business organization to host in-house.