Exciting updates to Windows Bastion and Windows Server

By Sonia Cuff, Senior Cloud Advocate at Microsoft

22/09/2022

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Many IT Pro skills are fundamental, no matter how the technology changes. Even in 2022 you still need to patch the Windows operating system and transfer files to and from virtual machines. We’re thrilled to have exciting announcements about both capabilities!

Windows Bastion supports native RDP clients (Preview)

Windows Bastion provides you with a way to connect to a Virtual Machine in Azure without the VM needing a public IP address or RDP port 3389 open to the Internet. But the browser-based remote session didn’t support access to your local clipboard, to copy and paste files between your machine and your VM. Now in preview, Azure Bastion can be used by the native RDP client to “tunnel through” to Azure, so you can use the RDP client’s file transfer ability.

Check out the prerequisites and the connection steps.

Hotpatch for Windows Server 2022

What if Microsoft bundled together Windows Server updates that didn’t need a reboot, so you could install them with no downtime? The new Hotpatch feature of Azure Automanage does just that and is now generally available for new Windows Server 2022 Azure Edition virtual machines. The best thing about this announcement is that Hotpatch is destined for all versions of Windows, including clients. Azure Edition is just the start, as the simplest use case for us to deploy to. Just don’t ask us for timeframes !

Learn more about Hotpatch.

Make sure you’re following the ITOps Talk blog, as we cover both the new announcements important to IT Pros, and those complex systems administration tasks with products you’re already using. Drop me a note if there’s something you’d like us to cover!