The main methods of hosting SharePoint are either On-Premises or Office 365. There are many reasons to use both solutions, however there is a 3rd option when migrating your business and SharePoint environments to the Microsoft Azure cloud. The Microsoft Azure Marketplace contains a template that can be used to easily setup a full SharePoint 2013 HA Farm that includes Windows Server 2012 R2 domain controllers, two SQL Server 2014 database servers, and four SharePoint Server 2013 servers (two web front ends and two application servers). This makes it extremely easy to setup a Microsoft SharePoint 2013 environment in the Microsoft Azure cloud.
To find the “SharePoint 2013 HA Farm” in the Azure Marketplace just follow the below steps:
- Navigate to the Azure Portal
- Click on the “New” plus sign button in the top left of the Azure Portal
- Simply type “SharePoint” into the search box, and “SharePoint 2013 HA Farm” will be an auto suggested option.
- Upon hitting Enter a list of results will display showing the “SharePoint 2013 HA Farm”
- Click on “SharePoint 2013 HA Farm” in the list to bring up the information about it
- Lastly, click “Create” and follow the prompts to configure and setup the VM
There are so many different systems that can be hosted in Microsoft Azure; SharePoint 2013 is one of them! Plus, the cost of the VM’s includes the licensing costs for everything.