Oracle and Microsoft are working together to help customers embrace cloud computing by providing the world class mission-critical business software of Oracle running on Azure, the leading public cloud platforms of Microsoft.

Oracle delivers

Microsoft and Oracle now provide best in class, end to end, support for customers running Oracle software on Azure. Use your existing licenses to run Oracle software on Oracle Linux on Azure and receive full support from Oracle.
Whether you’re an Oracle admin or a Java developer, you now have increased flexibility and choice in where to deploy your applications and the safety and security that comes from knowing you will be fully supported by Oracle.
The following is a list of the available pre-configured Oracle Virtual Machine images that run on Oracle Linux on Azure. Users are expected to bring your own license for these images, as Oracle license fees are not included in the usage of these preconfigured VM images. Here are complete details on Oracle licensing on Azure

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/oracle/

	Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Enterprise Edition is a leading Java EE application server, delivering next-generation applications on a mission-critical cloud platform, with native cloud management, and integrated tools.
	Oracle Linux 7.0.0.0 delivers extreme performance, advanced scalability, and reliability for enterprise applications and systems. Optimized for enterprise workloads, Oracle Linux is the only operating system to offer zero-downtime updates.
	Oracle Database 12c Standard Edition is an affordable, full-featured data management solution that is ideal for midsize companies
	Oracle Database 12c Enterprise Edition (12.1.0.1.0) is a next-generation database designed for the cloud. It offers more than 500 new features including a new multitenant architecture that simplifies consolidating databases onto the cloud and enables customers to manage many databases as one without changing their applications. Customers can choose a wide range of Oracle Database Enterprise Edition options to deliver on business users' performance, security, big data, cloud, and availability service-level expectations.

How is support for Oracle delivered?

For customers who have Oracle software licenses and support, Oracle delivers support directly to the customers running the Oracle software on Azure.  https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/cloud/faq-1963009.html

How to deploy it

Deploy Virtual Machines based on Oracle images, log into the Azure Portal, click on the Marketplace, click Compute, then type Oracle into the search box. Choose an Image and follow the instructions to set up the image on Microsoft Azure. Note that Oracle images by Oracle in the Azure Portal run on Oracle Linux and Oracle images by Microsoft run on Windows

Probably (or better hopefully) your on-premises servers running your internet-facing sites, applications and services are protected by a decent firewall solution. In many cases this on-premises firewall is a real physical device or at least a dedicated machine, protecting you from the big bad internet. How does this translate to the cloud where your sites, applications and services are not running in your own datacenter anymore? By default Azure will only open up endpoints to the internet, which you explicitly allow (e.g. port 80 for HTTP, 443 for SSL …). You can even choose to allow certain instances (e.g. a Virtual Machine) to only communicate with other instances which are part of your solution, and not with the internet.

But sometimes more advanced protection mechanisms are needed, which can be covered in by for example the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. This firewall provides protection against data loss, application-layer DDoS, and known and previously unknown zero day application-layer attack modalities. As new types of threats emerge, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall will acquire new capabilities to block them. These definitions are automatically updated and will “virtually patch” automatically on units in the field, ensuring the highest security posture for critical applications at all times. Additional capabilities include Granular Identity and Access Management which deliver strong authentication and access control that ensure security and privacy by restricting access to sensitive applications or data to authorized users.

Since the Barracuda Web Application Firewall is in the Azure Marketplace, setting it up is a breeze! You can choose to use your own license (Bring-Your-Own-License, BYOL), so you’ll only pay for the Azure VM consumption. Or you can choose to pay for the license itself as well.

• Barracuda Web Application Firewall (BYOL)

• Barracuda Web Application Firewall
  
  

The value for users is simple: In an on-premises datacenter world, the process would be much more complex, lengthy and costly. It is therefore not a surprise that there is a growing interests in accessing Azure Marketplace.

The value proposition for IT Pros is just as compelling: Azure Marketplace will bring you agility and cost reductions. Thanks to the Azure Marketplace you will be able to quickly react to the demands arising within your company; Azure marketplace indeed allows you, for instance, to easily provision VM images of many publishers (Partners, Community and Microsoft), even permitting  a self-service mechanism for developers to access the different VM images (more about this in the 2 accompanying articles).

The other major advantage for IT Pros is from a cost perspective. Whether you are looking for a test environment or for a particular service (Oracle, for instance), Azure Marketplace provides for per minute billing considerably reducing the running costs and investments (Capex investments).

With more than 3,000 offerings from Microsoft and industry leading software providers through the Azure Marketplace, the news have been received with great enthusiasm in the IT Pro community.

Check out the Azure Marketplace Today

We wanted to hear their experience and advice for all you ITPROs, s we took the opportunity (and the camera) to talk to some of the Belgian community guys shamelessly pick their brain.

Not shiny, not polished and all buffed but straight from the action!

Mike Resseler jumps right in and talks about the mind shift that needs to happen and why you should rethink your deployment methods

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKURXvEU1Ag:0:0]

Didier Van Hoye discusses the vision & strategy series he enjoyed and gives some truly valid arguments on why you should embrace the cloud (with the famous quote “if you haven’t heard about the cloud yet, it’s about time you do” J )

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgD3V1S60Sk:0:0]

Michael Van Horenbeeck, our Hybrid Deployment Guru, talks about what makes Ignite great – what could be better (yes, feedback is a gift!) and what you should embrace as an IT PRO going forward

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEBTH8PwPis:0:0]

Peter De Tender, finally had a very busy week at Ignite and talks about his role as MCT Ambassador and why you as an IT Professional should start working with Windows 10

[View:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfPoBt5XvfY:0:0]

By now most people headed back to Belgium and so are your humble reporters.

Stay tuned for more news, announcements and great advice on @technetbelux

Cheers and May the Cloud be with you!

Nick & Sigrid

@nicktrog @sissi_kaizerin

You can read all about our arrival in the Windy City in yesterday’s blog post.

So we headed for the McCormick Place conference center with the shuttle buses and having picked up our conference badges on Sunday, nothing was standing in our way to watch Satya’s keynote, right? Except, there were another 23000 people with that very same idea J. But all in all, we got to our seats pretty smoothly – kudos to the event staff!

First on stage was our CEO Satya Nadella, talking about the importance of IT innovation and how vital this is for businesses to succeed: “No business can succeed and scale without IT innovating and transforming. Empowering IT professionals is a key part of Microsoft’s technology agenda spanning Windows 10, Office 365, Azure and other cloud technologies.”

Already on the first day we witnessed an abundance of announcements across our technology platform, and Satya painted the big picture on how all these announcements address three big challenges and opportunities for IT professionals:

• More personal computing: think about how the platform allows for more ways of human interaction, such as ink, touch, gestures and even holographic computing. But personal computing also means dealing with personal data – we built trust into the core of the operating system. Finally, how can we ensure that all devices in an organization, corporate or end-user, can remain up-to-date. Enter Windows Update for Business! 

• Reinventing productivity and business processes: a user’s devices and software are becoming dual-use. Business productivity tools will be more and more integrated in communications tools and all experiences should have intelligence built in. Announcing as well: public preview of Office 2016 (with real-time co-authoring!), Skype for Business Broadcasting, and organizational analytics in Office Delve. Demonstrated by Joe and Brad later in the keynote, we also saw how IT can ensure compliance and data protection in a friction-free end-user experience.

• An intelligent cloud: an intelligent cloud drives application agility and brings together the best tooling and platforms. Introduced today and in preview this summer, Microsoft Azure Stack, brings the Azure user experience and both IaaS and PaaS into your datacenters.
  Also, the next preview of Windows Server 2016 is now available, demonstrating that small can be big, introducing Nano Server, a lightweight installation option. Furthermore, we also introduced Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), which brings you a cloud-based management solution across any hybrid cloud, including Azure, AWS, Windows Server, Linux, VMWare or OpenStack. Think of OMS as the backend version of what EMS brings to the client. OMS extends System Center 2016, which is also available in preview this week.
  Brad Anderson also demonstrated a new product, and in preview today, Microsoft Advanced Threat Analytics (ATA), which helps you identify breaches and threats using behavioral analysis and machine learning.

  Finally, our data platform also saw a huge announcement, with a public preview of SQL Server 2016 coming this summer! This new version will bridge between on-premises and cloud data even more and better. I’m definitely looking forward to being able to stretch tables across both.

Next on stage was Joe Belfiore, Corporate VP PC, Tablet & Phone, who again did some great demos to show how Windows 10 can bring more personal computing. The audience was especially awed by Continuum, Windows Hello and a demo of Cortana enabling you to ask natural language questions about your corporate data from PowerBI! Impressive is the least I can say.

Up next on stage were Gurdeep Singh Pall, Corporate VP Skype and Julia White, GM of Office, to talk about empowering the future of work and addressing the challenges of getting things done. I love this Gurdeep quote: “The workplace is a misnomer: work is not where you go but what you do.”

Next on stage Brad Anderson, Corporate VP Enterprise Client and Mobility , disclosing the future of IT with management, security and cloud infrastructure. There were amazing demos of Azure RMS and how document become self-tracking, providing compliancy and security while giving the user a friction-free experience. But also the new Advanced Threat Analytics service was very impressive. Check out all of Brad’s demos at https://aka.ms/BradIgniteRecap.

Finally, Terry Meyerson, Executive VP Operating Systems, closed the keynote with the Windows Update for Business announcement. This again brings great IT control, while giving end-user flexibility.

With such an impressive list of announcements and many more remarkable break-out sessions over the coming days, this Ignite conference is already memorable!

You can watch today’s keynote again and view more live streams and recordings on Channel 9.

Follow and contribute to Ignite on Twitter using the hashtag #msignite and follow our live updates via @technetbelux

Your humble reporters at Ignite,

Nick & Sigrid

@nicktrog @sissi_kaizerin

Frank Lloyd Wright”

Ignite has landed in the Windy City.

So what happens if a seasoned technical evangelist (Nick Trogh) and a veteran audience marketer (Sigrid Sangeeta Vandenweghe) arrive in Chicago one day before the conference starts?

We were able to enter the US quite swiftly. The border control features a self-service Homeland Security kiosk, you simply scan, get a receipt an off you go. This is how you make people welcome! That is progress! Even Sigrid was able to enter the US without any questions.

Chicago is a suberb city. Nice weather too, this time of the year, so we decided to go for a walk to the much praised  Navy Pier. Admitted, great view of Chicago’s unrivalled skyline, but the Navy Pier is one big strip of fast food tents and fairground attractions. Noisy kids and loud music “all in. Tip from the trippers: avoid it if you can. So we walked back and found a good Japanese hangout where Nick had tasty Takaki beef and Sigrid the hottest soup she’d ever had – unidentified flying vegs included. The rolls were simply unspeakably dramatically tasty J. Check it out if you’re looking for fresh, honest, fab.

After a typical ‘wake up at 3 AM and feel like a “worn out towel” jet lag night, we both went our own way in the AM (early) morning .

Nick strolled around the downtown area and headed for the Millennium Park. The park is located near the waterfront and a popular place for running and the typical outdoor group workouts. Apparently on Saturday it was home for the NFL 2015 Draft event, of which the remains could still be witnessed. The park features several art sculptures but the most popular attraction of the park is definitely Cloud Gate, which is also known as ‘The Bean’. It’s a giant steel sculpture in the shape of a … bean.

After some contemplating by the waterfront, it was time for more urban exploration. Some people take this to the extreme and walk down a building from the outside using ropes. Great initiative for raising money for charity, but we prefer using the elevator.

Sigrid is a Kundalini Yoga teacher and tries to follow as many classes as possible wherever she goes. So off to the Full Moon yoga class at 10 AM with live Gong meditation and a warm group of people asking how on earth a Belgian ends up downtown Chicago on a Sunday morning. Not all things need explaining. I was ‘ready for the world’ and fully energized after class.

Spotting Ignite-ees everywhere in the streets.

Excitement building up

Microsoft welcome boards everywhere.

We gathered back for a visit to the Chicago Art Institute, rated best museum in the Word by Trip Advisor. We split up, because art is best experienced alone, then shared after.

Unbelievable collection indeed. Hopper, Pollack, our Belgian Magritte and Delvaux, Miro, Dali, Liechtenstein, a huge Picasso selection, Paul Klee, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Max Ernst and so much more and that was only one part of the huge experience the museum has to offer (huge Impressionist collection, too). If you have the chance, visit, you will not regret it!

Experiencing art is a solitary thing, but it is best shared afterwards with a good glass of wine and some great veal and pasta.

Check out Acanto restaurant where we tasted the most extraordinary cheese

Yes, it can rain in the windy city. Especially after a hot day! Off to unwind in the hotel to write blogs and catch up on email, pick up the conference badge -amazed again by the smooth execution of Ignite-, a hot shower and dreams of the conference and the sparks of innovation.

Stay tuned for the real stuff tomorrow.

Your humble reporters at Ignite,

Nick & Sigrid

@nicktrog @sissi_kaizerin