Building SharePoint Farms using Windows Azure Virtual Machine (IAAS)

At TechEd this week, there was a lot of activity around the new Windows Azure Spring Preview. As a part of this release was the announcement of the new Virtual Machine. This is an important advancement for Microsoft and Windows Azure because it brings the cloud story into a position of greater strength. For SharePoint IT Pros and Developers, this means a broader usage purview to leverage the cloud for SharePoint workloads—cutting across the ability to leverage platform as a service (PAAS)—e.g. using the core services in Windows Azure such as SQL Database, Media Services, Hadoop on Azure, etc., software as a service (SAAS)—e.g. Office 365, and infrastructure as a service (IAAS)—e.g. creating or migrating standalone or multi-server farms to Windows Azure.

If you’re looking to get up and running on the Windows Azure VM…

To help you get started, there’s a couple of good resources:

Both of these posts by Michael Washam will help you get your head wrapped around the new Virtual Machine and how to use PowerShell to automate many of the different VM features.

If you’re looking for the MSDN docs, you can go here to check them out.

If you’re looking to check out how to create a SharePoint farm using Windows Azure VM…

Also, another good resource is a recent session at TechEd 2012 by Paul Stubbs. He talked about building SharePoint Farms using Windows Azure VM. Some great stuff here on very fresh content/resources!

You can get to it directly here.

There’s also a ton more great sessions from TechEd 2012 on Channel 9 as well. You can access all of the posted sessions here.

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Enjoy!

Steve
@redmondhockey