January 13th, 2012 
postlinks Microsoft Windows Azure is known for it’s performance among cloud providers in the market for quite some time. A lot of providers now provides cloud based VMs, including Rackspace, GoGrid and some like Reseller Cloud enables small hosting providers to sell cloud VMs without any investment on cloud, aka white labelled cloud hosting.
Amazon AWS has become the de-facto for virutal machine space, i.e. IaaS. Windows Azure is planning to release VM Role, aka VMs on Windows Azure, involves creating a base image, uploading it to Azure, and then creating a servic model in Visual Studio to point to the uploaded base image.
When you need to have data persistence in Azure VM Role, ex., while installing SQL Server or may be Sharepoint on your VM Role, you want your SQL Server’s data files to persist. The option here would be to mount azure drive and this azure drive will hold your data files.
For this Microsoft is planning to introduce a feature to have Azure VM itself having a persistence, means when the VM is unavailable/down for a moment, when it’s up again, it would’ve persisted the state of the apps/os running in it.
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