General availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services includes 'validation' for Dynamics NAV 2013, GP 2013

Microsoft formally announced the launch of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services today, a key step toward support for Microsoft Dynamics GP and NAV instances hosted on Azure virtual machines (VMs).

In the general availability announcement, Microsoft GM Bill Hilf of Windows Azure product marketing also noted that the Azure team has a list of "validated instances" ready to go, and Dynamics GP 2013 and NAV 2013 are already on the list.

In his words:

"By listening to customer feedback, we learned a lot about the workloads you want to run. As part of our new Infrastructure Services release, we've added in new high memory VM instances (28GB/4 core and 56 GB/8 core) to run your most demanding workloads.  We also learned more about the apps you want to run so we've added in a number of new Microsoft validated instances to our list including SQL Server, SharePoint, BizTalk Server, and Dynamics NAV to name a few."

If you follow the link in the above quote, the support article states that NAV 2013 and GP 2013, and "later" versions, are in fact supported on Windows Azure. Support, as described in this article, does not reflect the Dynamics GP and NAV teams' preparations for Azure support, according to a Dynamics team representative.  At Convergence 2013, Microsoft Dynamics executives stated they will target June to formally launch Azure deployments,

A Dynamics team representative reiterated to us that despite the support mentioned in the Azure Infrastructure Services documentation, June is still the target timeframe for supporting GP 2013 and NAV 2013 in Azure.  There ...