Microsoft is growing support for Intelligent Edge with the availability of Azure IoT Edge on virtual machines (VMs). The tech giant aims to create an open and strong ecosystem and provide users choices in deploying their edge solution.
Azure IoT Edge is a solution that brings cloud intelligence to the edge and allows users to act on data in real-time. Microsoft had made it generally available last year in June, and also open sourced the service on GitHub. This allows users to make changes to code and go for an open container approach for deploying Microsoft and third-party services across edge devices.
With the recent announcement, customers will be able to run Azure IoT Edge on a VM using a supported operating system. Although it will support most of the operating systems that can run containers, Microsoft said that all of them are not equally supported.
“While this works for multiple virtualization technologies, VMware has simplified the deployment process of Azure IoT Edge to VMs using VMware vSphere. Additionally, vSphere 6.7 and later provide passthrough support for Trusted Platform Module (TPM), allowing Azure IoT Edge to maintain its industry leading security framework by leveraging the hardware root of trust,” explained Chipalo Street, Principal Program Manager, Azure IoT, in a blog post.
Further, the tech giant said that the family of host OS should always match the family of guest OS used inside a module’s container. What this means is that customers will be allowed to run Linux containers on Linux only, and Windows containers on Windows.
Azure IoT Edge will run on a wide range of hardware, including microcontroller units (MCUs) that run Azure Sphere, and cloud and edge experience powered by Azure Stack.
Also read: Microsoft pushes preview of Open Enclave integration with IoT Edge
Microsoft has designed the solution to meet demands of customers in every scenario. For example, home appliance makers can use Azure Sphere certified chips in their products to make sure that their operations are secure, textile producers can detect weaving defects by adding industrialized PCs running Azure IoT Edge to their production lines.
