The Windows Azure team has been very busy recently adding a bunch of new features to Azure IaaS. Here are just some of the features you should check out.

Static IP for Azure instances
Until recently Azure VMs got their IP addresses from DHCP exclusively. There were some tricks to make your VMs get the same IP address most of the time, but in reality you really couldn’t guarantee the VMs would always get the same IP address as DHCP reservations are not supported. With this new feature you can not only assign a static private IP address to each VM, you can also assign a static public IP address to each VM. Previously public IP addresses were only used to address Cloud Services.

Multiple NIC Cards – Multiple NIC support is currently only available in the Northern Europe region, but will be rolled out worldwide soon according to Microsoft. Multiple NIC support will allow you to manage network traffic better. Personally I will be using multiple NICs in my failover cluster configuration for network redundancy and to keep my DataKeeper replication traffic separate from my client access traffic.

Internal Load Balancer – As of Oct 8^th you can now provision a single Internal Load Balancer (ILB) per Cloud Service. This is a HUGE improvement as you are now able to configure multi-tier applications that reside within the same Cloud Service and you no longer have to rely on External Load Balancers which send your traffic across the public network. The best new use case for this though is that this is now the recommend best practice for client access points when building failover clusters in Windows Azure. Check out this great new blog on the Azure Blog that talks about building failover cluster instances on Azure with SIOS DataKeeper Cluster Edition.

Check back soon for a Step-by-Step article on configuring a SQL Server 2014 Failover Cluster instance in Azure IaaS using DataKeeper Cluster Edition and all of these great new features.