Now available: FreeBSD in the Microsoft Azure Marketplace

Microsoft announced the availability of FreeBSD 10.3 as a ready-made virtual machine (VM) image in the Azure Marketplace. Users can now quickly bring-up a FreeBSD VM in Azure and in the event they need technical support, Microsoft support engineers can assist.
This extends Microsoft’s existing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Hyper-V. “We have done a tremendous amount of work over the past couple of years to make FreeBSD a first class VM guest on Hyper-V, enabling performant networking and storage capabilities that for the first time, made it possible to run production FreeBSD workloads in Hyper-V environments,” wrote Microsoft’s Jason Anderson, Principal PM Manager, Open Source Technology Center. “One of our primary reasons for making these investments in FreeBSD on Hyper-V was to enable FreeBSD VMs to run in Azure, as Hyper-V is the virtualization platform for Azure.”
Today’s Azure news is important for many top-tier virtual appliance vendors base their products on FreeBSD. “Over the past two years, we’ve worked closely with Citrix Systems, Array Networks, Stormshield, Gemalto and Netgate to bring their virtual appliances to the Azure Marketplace, and we’re continuing to work with a long list of others for future offerings,” wrote Anderson.
To learn more about this news and Microsoft’s work with the FreeBSD Foundation, check out the Azure blog. Get a free trial today.

Jose Miguel Parrella

José Miguel is an open source enthusiast and part of the Microsoft Azure team. For the last 10 years he has been developing enterprise-grade open source solutions for customers and partners in the Americas. He was a lead architect of Canaima 2.0 - the Venezuelan Linux distribution, a Debian Developer, published author and is a regular speaker in open source events across the world.

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