Moving your SharePoint Infrastructure to the Cloud? Have a requirement to host SharePoint in an IaaS solution? Look no further.

Microsoft have several Virtual Machine Sizes in Windows Azure IaaS which suit the requirements for SharePoint Server 2013 and have also certified Microsoft SharePoint Server 2013 running in Windows Azure IaaS.

The link to the whitepaper below details the best practices for deploying a SharePoint Infrastructure in Windows Azure:
SharePoint 2013 on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services
I have highlighted the important aspects of running SharePoint Server 2013 in Windows Azure IaaS below:

Supporting Infrastructure

• Deploy a Virtual Network and deploy a gateway in Windows Azure and create a site-to-site VPN if you have not done so already.
• Ensure that you have at least two domain controllers running in Azure IaaS to support the IaaS deployed infrastructure. They should belong to their own availability group.
• If you plan to deploy a new forest you can review the Windows Azure documentation Install a new Active Directory forest in Windows Azure.
• Never shutdown your domain controller in Windows Azure (Shutdown and restart only), you potentially get the infinite DHCP lease removed and at start-up, your domain controller will get a new IP address when it starts from a cold boot.

SharePoint 2013

• Ensure that each SharePoint role belongs to the appropriate availability set for high availability. This is so that there is a separation in fault domains and the roles do not go down during maintenance.
• Be aware of the network throughput and virtual disk limits per VM size in the depot, this is important to get the correct throughput and number of disks per role.
• Never store anything on the temporary space drive (D:).
• Ensure that your infrastructure points to the DNS servers defined in your VNet configuration.
• Use a Windows Azure load balancer since SharePoint 2013 now supports load balancers that do not support sticky sessions.
• Create gold images of your SharePoint servers so that you can deploy them from the Windows Azure Virtual Machine Gallery.

SQL Server 2012

• Ensure that you dedicate the SQL infrastructure for SharePoint.
• Add the SQL Servers into their own availability group.
• Create as many virtual disks as possible to optimize the SQL IO throughout.
• Review the whitepaper on Performance Guidance for SQL Server in Windows Azure Virtual Machines.
• Create multiple secondary database files for better SQL IO throughput (8 is the max recommended). Consider reviewing this video series on Channel 9 by Bill Baer for Tuning SQL Server 2012 for SharePoint 2013.
• Manage and set the min and max memory appropriately.
• Follow this guide for further information in Virtualizing SQL Server 2012.  Best Practices for Virtualizing and Managing SQL Server.

This information should provide you the basics of getting started in your journey to deploying a SharePoint farm in Windows Azure.

If you already have a private cloud built on Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V, I would highly recommend deploying System Center Virtual Machine Manager and App Controller to manage your private and public cloud infrastructure as a minimum. Many of the System Center products should be reviewed, planned and deployed accordingly since the there are no other solutions in the market place, that provide the comprehensive functionality which System Center provides, to deploy and manage Microsoft public and private clouds.