Tag: azure

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Microsoft SQL Server 2025 Failover Rights – staying or going?


Microsoft released SQL Server 2025 on November 18th 2025 and updated the Product Terms. However, the update has caused confusion and consternation amongst the Microsoft community – as it seems to suggest that failover rights as a Software Assurance benefit have been removed!!! 😱 (Spoiler alert – it’s almost certain they haven’t).

If you’re not familiar with this right it means, in a nutshell, that organisations who purchase SQL Server licenses with Software Assurance (SA) may license additional servers at no extra cost, as long as those servers are used only for disaster recovery/failover purposes. This is a long standing and widely used benefit – removing this right will mean one of 2 things:

  • Organisations’ SQL Server licensing will double/triple by millions of £/$/€ more per year
  • Organisations will be forced to have less resilient SQL Server systems, potentially leading to more downtime and lost revenue

Ultimately, if either of those were the case, I believe it would lead to a mass exodus of SQL Server customers. Microsoft may hope they would move to SQL Azure/SQL Server enabled by Azure Arc but I’d expect many to explore other options – Oracle, Postgres, Amazon RDS etc.

Largely because of that, and the fact that we have seen an increase in Product Terms errors over the last couple of years, I’m of the opinion that it is an error and will – eventually – be corrected…but it is worth looking at anyway.

As I was about to press publish, Peter Van Uden has commented on LinkedIn that he’s had confirmation that it is an error and will be corrected in the coming days.

Fellow Microsoft watcher Alex Golev noticed that the whole section had been deleted without replacement:

Other parts of the Product Terms still refer to this section which suggests this is an erroneous deletion…but it could also mean that they just didn’t edit those sections correctly.

This Microsoft page – https://www.microsoft.com/licensing/guidance/SQL?msockid=144db73d53b469e721fda347528468b6 which is licensing guidance for SQL Server 2025 still contains the failover rights information:

I genuinely believe this is an error. It is a huge change that would have significant consequences for most Microsoft customers, including their largest and most significant customers. Making this change would be an enormous risk and to do so without any official announcement or warning is unbelievable. I’m sure we’ll see a reversal in the coming days and that’s why I haven’t posted about this already.

However, I feel it does highlight the increasingly slapdash approach that has been taken to the Microsoft Product Terms since it became an online site, rather than document downloads. It seems likely to me that updates are being made by people with little understanding of software licensing and so they don’t see the consequence of their actions.

The fact that it’s 4 days since this change was made and there has been no word from Microsoft is disappointing – but hopefully that correction will appear soon.

So, don’t panic but do remember that these things happen and that Microsoft experts like me, Alex, Peter and more can be very useful in these scenarios. 😁

Update: The missing text has been reinstated so the panic is over. It does highlight the need for us all to be vigilant in the future though.

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Microsoft announce new European Cloud options


Microsoft announce new cloud options for Europe. There is an increasing push back from European organisations, particularly Government, against so many critical services and so much data all being run out of the US…this has been accelerated by the current geo-political situation too.

These announcements are Microsoft’s attempt to pre-emptively stem the flow of European customers away from their cloud services.

Altogether we’ve got:

  • Sovereign Public Cloud
  • Sovereign Private Cloud
  • National Partner Clouds
  • Microsoft 365 Local
  • Data Guardian
  • External Key Management
  • Regulated Environment Management

Microsoft 365 Local is interesting but the MS announcement only talks about productivity workloads like Exchange Server & SharePoint Server. Does M365 Local include Teams, Stream, ClipChamp, Planner etc.? 🤷‍♂️

Sovereign Public Cloud

Will be offered across all existing European datacentre regions, for all European customers, across enterprise services such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Security and Power Platform.

Customer data stays in Europe, under European Law, with operations and access controlled by European personnel, and encryption is under full control of customers.

Sovereign Private Cloud

Will support critical collaboration, communication and virtualization services workloads on Azure Local. This solution now integrates Microsoft 365 Local and the security platform with Azure Local, providing consistent capabilities for hybrid or air-gapped environments to meet resiliency and business continuity requirements

National Partner Clouds

Available in France (Bleu) & Germany (Delos Cloud), these will offer comprehensive capabilities of Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure in an independently owned and operated environment.

Microsoft 365 Local

Microsoft 365 Local provides customers with additional choice by bringing together Microsoft’s productivity server software into an Azure Local environment that can run entirely in a customer’s own datacentre.

This provides a simplified deployment and management framework for organizations to run Microsoft’s trusted productivity servers in environments they fully control. It remains to be seen exactly what is included and how the licensing works…

Data Guardian

Data Guardian will add an additional level of assurance by ensuring that only Microsoft personnel residing in Europe control remote access to these systems and adds additional human and technical oversight whenever engineers outside of Europe need access.

All remote access by Microsoft engineers to the systems that store and process your data in Europe is approved and monitored by European resident personnel in real time and will be logged in a tamper-evident ledger.

External Key Management

With external key management, customers can connect Azure to keys stored on their own Hardware Security Module (HSM) on-premises or hosted by a trusted third party.

Regulated Environment Management

The Regulated Environment Management service will allow customers to easily manage all these features in one place (for instance, configuring Data Guardian policies or reviewing access log entries).

The Microsoft announcement is here.

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Microsoft Product Terms: March 2025


Photo by Markus Winkler on Pexels.com

Removed “without Microsoft’s prior written approval” from the clause preventing using MS service to mine crypto…I guess they realised they were never going to give anyone permission for this!

Changed the Use Rights for Azure Local software from:

“Customer may use the Azure Local software only (i) on servers dedicated to Customer’s internal use“

to

“Customer may use the Azure Local software only (i) on devices dedicated to Customer’s internal use“

Microsoft say this represents a move to “include smaller, more affordable devices than traditional servers“

They also removed the following clause “Any customer support for Azure Local that may be available from Microsoft requires that Azure Local runs on server hardware that is pre-validated and listed in the Azure Local catalog or any successor.”

Added Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat to the list of EU Data Boundary Services

March 5th

You can now add the Microsoft 365 E5 Security add-on to the Business Premium SKU.

March 12th

Added a section on Data Handling of Query Data with M365 Copilot & M365 Copilot Chat:

  • Microsoft has no rights in Query Data other than as needed to provide the services,
  • Query Data is not used to improve Bing,
  • Query Data is not used to create advertising profiles or track user behavior,
  • Query Data is not shared with advertisers or otherwise beyond Microsoft and its contracted suppliers who are subject to terms no less protective than these provisions,
  • Query Data is not used to train generative AI foundation models, and
  • Query Data is treated as Customer confidential information and protected by appropriate technical and organizational measures.

Clarification that certain concurrent use rights for Defender on up to 5 devices does not include Server OSEs:

  • Eligible Licensed Users may use Microsoft Defender for Business on up to five concurrent devices. Customer may not use a Microsoft Defender for Business User SL with server OSEs.
  • Eligible Licensed Users may use Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management or Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Add-on on up to five concurrent devices. Customer may not use Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management or Microsoft Defender Vulnerability Management Add-On User SLs with server OSEs.
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Microsoft Financial Results: FY 24


It’s that time of year again – Microsoft have announced their Q4 and full financial year results…so let’s take a look.

Full Year FY24 Results

Revenue = $245.1 billion, a 16% increase

Net Income = $88.1 billion, a 22% increase

Microsoft Cloud = $135 billion +, a 23% increase.

Q4 FY 24 Results

Q4 Revenue = $64.7 billion, a 15% increase

Q4 Net Income = $22 billion, a 10% increase

Microsoft Cloud

This isn’t a Business Unit but rather a group of related products across the organisation including:

  • Azure
  • O365 Commercial
  • Dynamics 365
  • Parts of LinkedIn
  • “Other cloud properties”

Revenue was $36.8 billion, an increase of 21% Year on Year (YoY).

Microsoft note that gross margin decreased YoY to 69%. This is driven by “sales mix shift to Azure” but was partially offset by Microsoft making Azure improvements including scaling their AI Infrastructure.

Now let’s look at some of the individual Business Units and how they performed in Q4 FY24.

Productivity and Business Processes

Revenue = $20.3 billion, an 11% increase

Office 365 Commercial = 13% increase. Seat growth was again driven by SMB and Frontline Worker growth while Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) growth was driven by E5 and Copilot for M365.

LinkedIn = 10% increase

Dynamics 365 = 19% increase <– This is now almost 90% of all Dynamics revenue.

This gives a good overview of growth over the last 5 quarters:

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $28.5 billion, a 19% increase

Azure (and other cloud services) growth was 29% for this quarter, a little drop from the percentage point increase of the last 2 quarters but, as it’s Q4, likely increasing from a higher base. Microsoft highlight that 8 points of this growth was from AI services.

Amy Hood (CFO) states that AI demand is higher than Microsoft’s currently available capacity but they expect availability to increase in H2 FY25 aka Jan 2025 onwards.

Server Products grew by 2% this quarter, again driven by hybrid BYOL use with Azure Hybrid Benefit.

Overall growth over the last 5 quarters looks like this:

Overall business and FY25

In terms of how Microsoft are spending money, Amy Hood, CFO, stated that:

“Cloud and AI related spend represents nearly all of total capital expenditures [CAPEX]. Within that, roughly half is for infrastructure needs where we continue to build and lease datacenters that will support monetization over the next 15 years and beyond. The remaining cloud and AI related spend is primarily for servers, both CPUs and GPUs, to serve customers based on demand signals.”

Amy Hood gave her expectations for Q1 FY25 (and beyond) and they are:

Productivity and Business Processes

Expected revenue growth of between 10% and 11% in constant currency (or $20.3 to $20.6 billion), with O365 driven by E5 and Copilot for M365.

Intelligent Cloud

Expected revenue growth of 18 – 20% (or $28.6 to $28.9 billion) with Azure expected to be 28% – 29% up.

Earnings Call highlights

  • 42 mentions of Copilot.
  • Number of customers with 10,000+ licenses of Copilot for Microsoft 365 doubled quarter over quarter,
  • Industry specific Copilots are here. DAX Copilot for Healthcare (over on the Nuance side of the portfolio) has over 400 customers currently.
  • Over 1,000 paying customers of Copilot for Security. Satya Nadella also states they have “1.2 million security customers” <– that indicates a lot of potential growth for Copilot there!
  • 60,000+ Open AI customers – with average spend per customer increasing.
  • GitHub Copilot accounts for over 40% of GitHub’s revenue and is bigger than GitHub was when Microsoft acquired it.
  • 36,000 Azure Arc customers, a 90% YoY increase.
  • 14,000+ paying Microsoft Fabric customers.
  • 48 million Monthly Active Users of Power Platform, a 40% YoY increase.
  • Over 40,000 organisations using Dynamics 365 Business Central.
  • Over 3 million users of Teams Premium.
  • More large-scale SAP workloads being migrated to Azure.
  • There was further growth in the “number of 10-million-dollar-plus and 100-million-dollar-plus contracts for both Azure and Microsoft 365“

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Microsoft vs CISPE: An agreement


Microsoft & CISPE have come to an agreement which takes some of the legal pressure off Microsoft and should lead to a more diverse cloud market…to a point.

Background

CISPE (the Cloud Infrastructure Service Providers in Europe) is, as its name suggests, a group comprised of, and working for, European Cloud hosting organisations including AWS, OVH, and Aruba.

In November 2022, CISPE filed a formal complaint with the European Commission about Microsoft’s “anti-competitive licensing practices” in the cloud. CISPE said:

“the new contractual terms imposed unilaterally by Microsoft on 1st October 2022 add new unfair practices to the list. Microsoft’s ongoing position and behaviours are irreparably damaging the European cloud ecosystem and depriving European customers of choice in their cloud deployments.”

The crux of the issue is that Microsoft’s licensing rules make it cheaper to run Microsoft workloads in Azure than any other cloud environment, thus giving them an unfair advantage against their competitors.

What’s happened now?

The two parties have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) where Microsoft have committed to make changes to address the claims and so CISPE have agreed to withdraw its complaint and also that they “will not initiate or support complaints on these issues in Europe or elsewhere”. Microsoft have also agreed to pay $22 million to CISPE to reimburse them for the last 3 years’ of “cost of litigation and campaigns for fair software licensing”.

Central to the agreement is Microsoft agreeing to release “Azure Stack HCI for Hosters”. This new Azure Stack HCI offering will include:

  • Multi-session virtual desktop infrastructure based on Windows 11
  • Free Extended Security Updates (ESU)
  • Pay-as-you-go licensing for SQL Server

Enabling 3rd-party cloud providers to close the gap between their services and those available in Microsoft Azure – a key part of the complaint.

There is a clock ticking for Microsoft now, as changes must be made within 9 months. They must release this new offering and/or solve the issues another way within that timeframe otherwise the complaint will be refiled with the European Commission.

It must be noted that CISPE state:

“Amazon Web Services, a CISPE member, was excluded from these negotiations and it, along with Google Cloud Platform and AliCloud, will neither benefit from nor be bound by these terms”

This means Microsoft’s “Listed Provider” exclusion still applies to this change.

European Cloud Observatory (ECO)

This new body, established by CISPE and including Microsoft, will monitor the development of “Azure Stack HCI for Hosters” and the fairness of Microsoft’s cloud licensing.

Reception

Not everyone is happy with this outcome. It has been reported that Google made an offer to CISPE worth almost $500 million, comprised of licenses and cash, for them to continue their compliant against Microsoft.

Additionally, Google’s Head of Platform, Amit Zavery, has said:

“Microsoft’s playbook of paying off complainants rather than addressing the substance of their complaint hurts businesses and shouldn’t fool anyone“

while an AWS spokeperson stated:

“Microsoft selectively making these changes for some CISPE members shows that there are no technical barriers that prevent Microsoft from making its software more easily available to rival cloud providers”

What’s next?

The Azure Stack for Hosters product will enable cloud providers to offer new features and capabilities that are attractive to customers, which is good. The main issue that many people may have is that this agreement excludes Amazon AWS and Google Cloud Platform, so their customers are no better off than before.

While that is true, I think it is also representative of what I believe is CISPE’s main aim – to help boost the non-hyperscaler cloud market in Europe. They want to help companies like OVH, Irideos, and UpCloud more so than Amazon and Google.

This is certainly not the end of this story. The cloud is going to be a battleground for many years to come and so licensing and competitive advantages will be a key issue for some time…

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Microsoft Power BI Premium retired


Microsoft have announced the end of Power BI Premium Capacity SKUs in favour of the newer and shinier Microsoft Fabric. Note that the “Power BI Premium per-user” SKU is unaffected.

Key dates

  • New customers will not be able to purchase Power BI Premium after July 1st, 2024.
  • Existing non-EA customers can renew until Jan 1st, 2025. If your renewal date is after that, you will need to transition to Fabric at renewal. Additional Power BI Premium capacity can be purchased until the end of the agreement.
  • EA customers can continue with Power BI Premium until the end of their contract. If that is post Jan 1st, 2025 they will need to switch to Fabric at renewal. Additional Power BI Premium capacity can be purchased until the end of the agreement.
  • Sovereign Cloud customers are unaffected as they don’t currently have access to Fabric.

Benefits and differences

Fabric is the evolution of Power BI Premium and the next step in Microsoft’s organisation wide data analytics strategy. Thus, as well as the Power BI Premium functionality, Fabric contains additional services and features such as OneLake and various Azure services. Additional benefits include:

  • Fabric can be used to contribute towards your MACC (Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment) agreement.
  • There is a Pay As You go (PAYG) option for Fabric.
  • Fabric SKUs start at a lower point that Power BI Premium. However, note that Copilot for Power BI (which I assume will become Copilot for Fabric) doesn’t work for the lower end SKUs.

Of course, there is always something that is removed or made more complicated with any product retirement and this is no different.

Each Power BI Premium capacity P-SKU includes the ability to run Power BI Report Server on-premises…but Microsoft Fabric does not, and is not compatible with it. To continue accessing Power BI Report Server, you will need to have SQL Server Enterprise w/SA instead.

Microsoft announcement

FAQ page

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Microsoft Cloud for Retail: Pricing and licensing


Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

Microsoft have added another Industry Cloud to the Product Terms – this time it’s Microsoft Cloud for Retail.

I’m still working through some of the info and it doesn’t necessarily all seem complete yet but here’s the overview I can give so far.

Licensing

It is available as an add-on SKU, currently only Dynamics 365 Customer Insights is listed as an eligible base license to purchase the add-on. The Microsoft Docs site lists other licenses that are required in order to use certain elements of the retail cloud solution, these are:

Retail cloud featureRequired license
Omnichannel for Customer ServiceDynamics 365 Commerce / Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Microsoft 365 for Frontline WorkersMicrosoft 365 (F or E SKUs)
Power Virtual AgentsPower Virtual Agents

as well needing an Azure subscription to use:

  • Synapse Analytics
  • Cognitive Search
  • Intelligent Recommendations

Pricing

The Microsoft datasheet lists it as being $20,000 per tenant per month but also states that you “only pay for what you don’t already own“.

This makes sense as they won’t want to penalise customers who are already investing in some of these products but does suggest negotiations will be needed to get pricing…leading to the potential for different rates at different points of the year.

Availability

Available only via EA/EAS, Microsoft Cloud for Retail can currently be deployed from:

  • USA
  • Canada
  • United Kingdom
  • Singapore
  • Australia

and is available in English and French – the latter only being an option in Canada at the moment though.

Further Reading

Microsoft Cloud for Retail datasheet

Microsoft Docs page

Microsoft Cloud for Retail Product Terms page

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Microsoft give more info about VMware on Azure


Intro

Microsoft recently announced their plans to start running VMware software natively within the Azure cloud. This caused much interest in the tech world as well as some angry words from VMware!

You can read more about the initial announcement here

After the initial blog post, Microsoft went very quiet and had no more to say on the subject. I attended a webinar about VMware & Azure but this just covered the Azure Migrate tool – Microsoft’s new way of converting on-premises VMware VMs to Azure VMs running in the cloud…a great offering but not the super interesting part really!

Some news!

Today (December 19, 2017) Microsoft have given us a bit of an update, in a new blog post.

They tell us that they’re working with multiple VMware partners and will run the solution on existing VMware certified hardware:

preview hardware will use a flexpod bare metal configuration with NetApp storage

This will allow organisations to continue running the VMware software they have invested in – both in terms of money and time – and that they trust to run their business, but also allow them to have L3 network connectivity with Azure services such as:

  • Azure Active Directory
  • Azure Cosmos DB
  • Azure Functions

Microsoft are in discussions with these VMware partners – and also VMware themselves – and aim to:

make this offering generally available next year

VMware’s Angry Words

Interestingly, VMware angry words have become less angry.

There initial blog post was quite confrontational but has since been updated and now ahs a more reconciliatory tone. For example:

Original Post:

Recently, Microsoft announced preview of VMware virtualization on Azure, a bare-metal solution that is stated to run a VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located with other Azure services in partnership with VMware-certified partners. No VMware-certified partner names have been mentioned nor have any partners collaborated with VMware in engineering this offering. This offering has been developed independent of VMware, and is neither certified nor supported by VMware.

Revised post:

Recently, Microsoft announced a preview of VMware virtualization on Azure, a bare-metal solution that is stated to run a VMware stack on Azure hardware, co-located with other Azure services in partnership with VMware-certified partners. This offering is being developed independent of VMware, however it is being offered as a dedicated, server-hosted solution similar in approach to other VMware Cloud Provider Partners (VCPP). The deployment is on VMware certified hardware consisting of FlexPod. VMware is in the process of engaging with the partner to ensure compliance and that the appropriate support model is in place.

The original post also said:

Microsoft recognizing the leadership position of VMware’s offering and exploring support for VMware on Azure as a superior and necessary solution for customers over Hyper-V or native Azure Stack environments is understandable but, we do not believe this approach will offer customers a good solution to their hybrid or multi-cloud future.

This is now nowhere to be found in the updated blog post!

A better relationship between the two vendors will surely make for a better experience for customers who take up this new offering as closer ties should mean better support.

Next steps

They say they’ll share more info on plans for General Availability and partners “in the coming months” and if you’d like to take part in the preview – contact your Microsoft account manager.

Further reading:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/blog/vmware-virtualization-on-azure/

https://blog.cloud.vmware.com/s/content/a1y6A000000aFlgQAE/vmware-the-platform-of-choice-in-the-cloud https://www.itassetmanagement.net/2017/11/28/vmware-azure/

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Adding Azure to an Enterprise Agreement


It’s now easier than ever for customers to add Windows Azure to their Enterprise Agreement (EA).

You commit upfront to a monthly amount that you feel will cover all your needs, and that monetary commitment can be utilised in any way within Azure.

image

Previously, you would receive great payment terms for your monetary commitment but – should you go over that amount (known as “overage”) – the extra usage would be charged at much higher rates. This effectively punished organizations who thought “wow, this Azure stuff is cool” – but no more, Overage is now charged at the same rates as the initial agreed amount. This makes increasing the usage of Azure a much more compelling proposition.

See Josh Waldo’s full post here:

http://www.digitalwpc.com/Community/Perspectives/Pages/Windows-Azure-added-to-Enterprise-Agreement-Use-it-to-power-your-solutions-.aspx?wt.mc_id=corp_mpn_tw_dwpc_joshwaldoazureagreement#fbid=7Lt8ur4Ygjd

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Microsoft Cloud Database Testing


Project Huron, one of Microsoft’s group of cloud-based teams, are asking customers to get involved with testing a first release of their online database synchronization effort; which will be done via the Azure platform & SQL Data Services.

The Huron team said “We are looking for are any customers that are looking to share SQL Server or SQL Compact databases via the cloud and have an existing project that would warrant this functionality…”

The team’s blog says “The goal is to remove the typical complexities (configuration, scalability, security, etc) involved with sharing database information between local databases such as SQL Server and SQL Compact and provide simple UI tools for configuration and sync components developers can embed in existing applications.”

Screen mockups:

huron1huron2

For those of you that are interested in being an early adopter for this-fill in this short email form here:

Project Huron Early Adopter Contact Form

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