Virtual Machines
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VM Created from custom image should be able to select storage account for VHD
When we try to create a virtual machine from a custom image the VHD's for the new virtual machine are created in the same storage account as the custom image. This is not ideal because most customers have different environments in different subscriptions so they are forced to copy the image into storage account in each subscriptions. It is not easy to copy the images between the storage accounts either.
540 votesThis is currently being developed by the team and should be available in the next few months! Sorry for the delay and thank you for voting this one up!!
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Allow me to select drive letter for the temp drive in virtual machine.
Customers have been asking for this every since IAAS went into preview. There are many customer migrating their on premise applications to Azure IAAS. Some of these applications have hard references to D: drive. It is possible to manually move temp drive from D: to another drive letter but it is hard to automate this. A simple fix for this is to move this temp drive to a Z: drive. A better fix may be to allow Azure Portal and PowerShell to select the drive letter for the temp drive during VM creation process.
This will simplify migrations.
452 votesunder review ·
AdminAzure IaaS Engineering Team
(Azure IaaS Engineering Team, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure)
responded
We are looking into this. There are a few updates that we need to make on how we configure the ephemeral disk to ensure that Windows will consistently keep the same drive letter for this drive so that we can continue to keep the pagefile on the ephemeral disk to ensure optimal performance.
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Ability to move virtual machines to a different region
Ability to move virtual machines to a different region
411 votesWe are taking a look at this feature to see how we can enable this in an easy and fast way.
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rename vm
Add the ability to rename a VM. The VM name is what appears in Azure, not the DNS name.
Changing a VM's name should not affect the VM in any way. If you need a unique identifier for a VM that does not change, I suggest using a GUID rather than the VM's name in Azure.
374 votesWe are considering this support to rename a VM.
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Upload VHDX
A support for uploading VHDX images would be great. With that it wouldn't be necessary anymore to migrate a VHDX to VHD before.
312 votesWe are currently looking at adding native support to VHDX. No committed date, just yet.
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Mac OS X Virtual Machines
Several, non-Microsoft/non-Azure, cloud-hosting services offer either dedicated, or virtualized machines running Mac OS X (with the OS running on Apple hardware, due to Mac OS X licensing). Examples include http://macstadium.com/, http://xcloud.me/, and http://www.macincloud.com/, among others.
Being able to provision a Mac OS X machine on Azure, using Azure pricing, and potentially, Azure Virtual Networking, would be useful for developers wishing to set up build machines for iOS apps, and potentially other use-cases.
286 votes -
Production / Staging VM
Provide a way to group VMs into production / staging environment. Somehow like the production / staging environments of cloud services.
278 votesGreat feedback. Do others want this as well? Please up-vote it. :)
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Ability to move VM into a VNET (Virtual Network)
The ability to move a existing VM into a existing Virtual Network.
273 votesThis is something we are planning to deliver. We don’t yet have a committed timeline.
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WSUS as a Service in Windows Azure
Microsoft needs to develop a WSUS as a service in Microsoft Azure with support for update domain in Azure. Perhaps it should be linked together with the System Center Advisor.
221 votesWe are considering a update service but not specific plans right now. Thanks for the recommendation. Let’s get the votes up. :)
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Enable ICMP traffic to Azure VMs over the Internet
There are several scenarios that ICMP traffic to Azure VMs is necessary. Specially for monitoring tools that requires this kind of communication. When the time this was written, AWS offers ICMP traffic controlled by endpoints, which is not possible with Azure VMs endpoints.
208 votesunder review ·AdminAzure IaaS Engineering Team
(Azure IaaS Engineering Team, Microsoft, Microsoft Azure)
responded
We are always looking at enhancing the network functionality.
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Delete VM with all associated resources
Deleting a VM is a lot of click work. I have to manually delete the associated Network interface, Network security group, Public IP address. And then, from the associated storage account, I have to drill down into the VHD container in the right Blob to delete the associated .vhd and .status files.
Also, I have to do it in the right order, because there are dependencies between the various objects. If not, it fails, and I get a big fat pink error.
Also, the overview list does not refresh after the 'success' notification is posted, so I sit there guessing…
205 votesThis is on the roadmap. We want to carefully design this to make sure data is not deleted accidentally.
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Shareing Virtual Machines Between Different Azure Accounts
I have 10 plus developers in my group. All have MSDN licenses and we are exploring the use of Azure to do our SharePoint development. In order to setup SharePoint properly you need 3 Virtual Machines, a DC, a SQL Server and a SharePoint server. It would be nice if between the 10 developers they could share a DC and SQL Server and only have a SharePoint server unique to them. Of course, doing this in a secure fashion is key.
193 votesThe ability to share images between subscriptions that are under the same billing entity is something we are looking to add.
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Add gallery image for Server 2012 R2 Standard
Please add a gallery image for Server 2012 R2 Standard.
Please allow this option so we can align with our corporate standard VM version, it would not be a big deal if we could bring our own standard image and deploy it across storage accounts, but that is not possible either... so we either have to use a gallery image and customize it, or else we have to bring our own standard image and keep it across many, many storage accounts and subscriptions.
Using Datacenter version locks us into Azure, there is a big licensing cost to bring a VM…
184 votesThis is really good feedback. Thanks for raising the licensing issues when moving these images around. We do want to make mobility easy. Let me dig into it…
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A "sleep" state of VM which is cost wise similar to stop state. The VM wakes up and continues the previous session without rebooting OS.
It is a great feature of Azure to stop costs if the VM is stopped. But shutdown the VM needs close all the running programs and applications in the current session. It will be great if the VM can have a sleep mode which can stop all the costs (or partially). So users can quickly resume the work in the new session without restarting the VM.
182 votesGreat feature request. Let us go take a look at what this would take to build.
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Allow resize of attached VHD-disks
Right now you cannot resize your VHD-disks once attached to a VM directly from the portal. Edit should be possible to at least increase the size of VHD-disks on demand.
173 votesGiven the sparse nature of Windows Azure Storage and with recent announcement for trim support on guest OS’s that support trim, the need for resizing should be reduced, as you should just assume you start with the largest size possible and only pay for what you use.
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Allow easy donation of unused CPU cycles to cancer research, Folding@home, etc.
I would like to easily 'donate' my unused CPU cycles towards a good cause, such as cancer research within the Folding@home project.
Ideally this setting would be incorporated into the config of my worker roles, or within the Windows Azure portal.
160 votes -
Please provide a way for grouping the endpoints and assign as a group name to the Azure VMs
We are adding endpoints for each virtual machine once created. Normally the RDP endpoint will be created by default, and can be added more if required by specifying the port #. I feel there are additional features needed to make this feature more flexible and to secure them in a centralized place. Some are -
1. The endpoints are configured by defining the ports, but it is not accepting whether the ports are inbound or outbound. So, there should be an option to include the port to open for inbound or outbound instead of configuring in the VM.
2. There…
121 votesGood feedback to improve experience around endpoint mapping.
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Ability to Hibernate VMs to support DevTest workflos
The new DevTest Azure portal feature has the ability to turn off VMs on a schedule to support dev/testing without breaking the budget. It would be nice if the VMs could be hibernated instead so that developers would not lose their development sessions/window settings etc. when they start off in the morning. But I understand that the ability to hibernate VMs in Azure is not currently a core feature that exists. It would be very nice if that feature could be added. I'm sure there are other use cases where VM hibernation could be very handy too.
107 votes -
Accelerate VM startup time
Startup time of a Windows VM in AWS is 1-1.5 minutes. In Azure this takes at least 5 minutes. VM Startup time is a big deal!
99 votesThanks, Daniel, for the feedback. We are constantly working to improve VM start-up time.
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Ability to mount a blob or virtual disk as an iSCSI device
Either blobs or virtual disks should be mountable as as an iSCSI device. Right now, I'd have to create a windows server with an iSCSI target. This seems like madness because the blob is already some kind of virtual device.
iSCSI is ideal for clustering and availability services and would solve problems with SQL Server clusters and other Windows Server cluster requirements.
98 votesRight now, we don’t plan to add this support but up-vote this and we could consider.
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