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Well, I’m fresh back from Microsoft Ignite 2016. It was a busy week of attending sessions and booth duty for Nutanix :). Here is a summary of highlights and pics from the conference. I plan on diving deep into each of the major highlights over the coming weeksmonths. My first blog post will be on Storage Spaces Direct and its evolution. On to the updates…

Highlights by Solution

System Center 2016

GA in October

OMS

Announced 3rd party extensibility

Azure Stack

GA mid-calendar ‘17
Tech Preview 2 available now

Azure Marketplace

Azure Marketplace apps can be offered via Azure Stack as well
- Conditions and compatibility will apply.
- ISV owners need to ensure their solution compatible and opt-in to offer on Azure Stack
- Roadmap of intentions for marketplace:
  - Highest
    - Always connected scenarios
    - Marketplace bring-your-own-license VM Images
  - Next
    - Connected and occasionally connected
    - Marketplace lifecycle (servicing)
    - Extensions and other artifacts in the marketplace
  - Late
    - Complete marketplace publishing pipeline
    - Billing based on usage data

Azure VM Sizes

New VM Sizes announced
- NC (NVIDIA Compute) – just went into preview
- NV (NVIDIA visualization) – just went into preview
- H (focus on compute that’s not GPU)
- L (Close to G-series, but less memory so less expensive. IE – Big Data workloads for less)

SAP HANA on Azure

Will be announced tomorrow
SAP BW & EE oftp
SAP Business Suite
S/4 HANA
HANA One

Azure Networking

Will be announced this week
IPv6 for Azure VMs (north-south)
VNET Peering
MAC Persistence
Azure DNS
Multiple IPs per NIC

Windows Server 2016

GA in October 12th
Security focus
- Credential Guard
- Just enough and Just-in-time administration
- Shielded VMs
- Can utilize TPM 2.0 and UEFI 2.3.1
Server/VM Maximums
- 24 TB of memory per host
- 12 TB of memory per VM
- 240 virtual processors per VM
Clustering
- Fault domain awareness
- Rolling upgrades
Networking
- Quote from Jeffery Snover (paraphrased). “Don’t buy hardware without RDMA capable NICs”
- Note from someone attending from Chelsio, iWarp doesn’t require specific switch functionality (ROCE does).
- Network virtualization: vxlan support