Azure service

Servers without the hardware, on Azure Virtual Machines.

Azure Virtual Machines run your Windows and Linux servers in Microsoft’s Canadian data centres. We size them properly, secure them, back them up and keep the cost under control.

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What Azure Virtual Machines covers

Windows ServerLinuxManaged disksAvailability zonesHybrid Benefit

What it is

What is Azure Virtual Machines?

An Azure Virtual Machine is a server you rent from Microsoft instead of buying. It behaves like a physical server: you choose the operating system, install applications and connect it to your network. The difference is that Microsoft owns and maintains the hardware, power, cooling and data centre.

For many businesses this is the natural destination for the file server, application server or domain controller that is approaching the end of its hardware life. There is no capital purchase, no five year refresh cycle and no server room to cool.

Virtual machines are not magic. A badly sized, unpatched, internet exposed VM in Azure is as risky and as expensive as the same machine in an office. The value comes from design: right size, right security, right backup and right ongoing management.

Azure offers many VM families. Burstable B-series machines suit light workloads. General purpose D-series is the usual choice for servers. Memory optimized E-series suits databases, and compute optimized and GPU families serve specialist workloads. Picking the right size is the single biggest lever on cost.

Canada Central, in the Toronto area, and Canada East, near Quebec City, let you keep data in Canada. Canada Central supports availability zones, which place copies of your workload in separate data centre buildings for higher resilience.

Key features

What Azure Virtual Machines can do.

Windows and Linux

Run Windows Server, Red Hat, Ubuntu, SUSE and more, from Microsoft or marketplace images.

Many sizes and families

Choose compute, memory and storage to match the workload, and resize as needs change.

Managed disks

Premium SSD, Standard SSD and Standard HDD disks with built in redundancy and encryption at rest.

Availability options

Availability sets and availability zones protect against hardware and data centre failures, with higher uptime commitments.

Azure Hybrid Benefit

Bring eligible Windows Server and SQL Server licences with Software Assurance to reduce the running cost.

Reservations and savings plans

Commit to one or three years of use for a significant discount on steady workloads.

Auto shutdown and scaling

Switch development machines off outside working hours, and scale sets add or remove machines with demand.

Secure remote access

Azure Bastion and just in time access remove the need to expose remote desktop ports to the internet.

How it works

How Azure Virtual Machines works.

Plan

Inventory workloads, check dependencies and choose size, region and availability.

Build

Create the network, security rules, disks and VMs using repeatable templates.

Protect

Add backup, patching, monitoring and endpoint protection.

Operate

Monitor, review cost and resize regularly as the business changes.

Under the hood

What happens behind the scenes.

You deploy a VM into a virtual network inside an Azure subscription. Its disks live in Azure storage with redundant copies, and the VM runs on a host server in a Microsoft data centre. If a host fails, Azure restarts the VM on another one.

Network security groups act as a firewall in front of the machine, and management access is routed through secure services instead of open ports. Updates, antivirus and backup are configured through Azure services and our management tools, just as they would be for a physical server.

Business impact

How it benefits your business.

The most immediate impact is on your capital budget and risk. You stop buying servers every few years, and you stop worrying about a single server failing in a closet. Resilience that was expensive to build in an office is a setting in Azure.

The second impact is flexibility. Need a test server for a month? Create it, use it and delete it. A new office opens? Add capacity in minutes. When a workload shrinks, you resize it and the bill follows.

Third, it improves continuity. Staff reach cloud servers from anywhere, and a power cut or flood at your office no longer takes the business offline.

Key benefits

The benefits at a glance.

No hardware refresh

Microsoft maintains the hardware, power and cooling.

Built in resilience

Redundant storage and availability options reduce downtime risk.

Pay for what you use

Resize, switch off or delete servers as needs change.

Data in Canada

Deploy in Canada Central or Canada East when residency matters.

Works with Microsoft 365

Single identity with Entra ID and familiar tools.

Faster projects

Create test and staging servers in minutes.

Pricing: You pay for compute by the hour or second, plus storage and networking. One or three year reservations and Azure Hybrid Benefit can reduce cost. Azure prices and features change, so we confirm current pricing and design to a budget before you commit.

In practice

What this looks like day to day.

A 50 person company runs a line of business application on a nine year old physical server. Rather than buy a replacement, Infinity migrates it to a right sized Azure VM in Canada Central, adds backup and endpoint protection, and connects it to the office with a VPN. The old server is retired, and the application runs faster with a defined recovery plan.

This is an illustrative example of how the service is used, not a description of a specific client.

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