New Azure Virtualization Features Offer More Development, Demo Options for Microsoft Dynamics CRM

This spring Microsoft released some important changes to Windows Azure including Azure Web Sites and the new deployment model for xRM Portals or extensions as well as Azure Virtual Machines where companies can set up development or demo Dynamics CRM environments running in the cloud.

"There's a Metro UI-style dashboard and an HTML 5 interface with no Silverlight, so you get a better administration interface that will be able to support many of our mobile platforms as well," said Shan McArthur of Adxstudio, at a recent online meeting of the xRM Virtual User Group. "Other new features include Windows Azure Web Sites and Azure Virtual Machines."

"The really cool thing is the portal technology," McArthur said.

The new portal provides a streamlined experience for managing your Windows Azure Web Sites, and you can access it from any browser, including running on a mobile device like an IOS device/Android device or a Windows Phone, according to Microsoft.

"You can run CRM demos in virtual machines" as well, he explained. "You can do CRM Online demos if that fits your nature but if you have more customized demos and need to not spend quite as much time creating those demos for your customers, you can play around with them in the virtual machine and have the virtual machine in the cloud, too."

The virtual machines option is significant because the disks that back the virtual machines are now durable, in contrast to the VM Role machines that didn't have  a durable hard disk storage, but rather a hard drive on the local machine, McArthur said.

"The virtual machines now have durable hard disks that are ...