Hakan Tuncer @hakant via Twitter

"I find certain incompatibilities between new and old Azure portal annoying. Can't put my Webapp and SQL VM into the same affinity group now."

@AzureSupport I thought "resource group" also serve the purpose of "affinity groups" but it looks like not.

@AzureSupport "Affinity groups" are obsolete. My question is what is the new concept that replaced it? Can't seem to find this info anywhere.

Thanks,

@AzureSupport

Affinity groups are being replaced by Regional Virtual Networks.

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/14/regional-virtual-networks/

As I understand, in time, all Affinity Groups in Azure will be migrated to Regional

Let me explain:

- Affinity group concept were introduced to Azure to make two virtual machines under the same Affinity Group to be provisioned on the same virtual network boundary. In fact, at this time, Virtual Networks were not region-spanning , that means that you can deploy two virtual machines in the same region and connect them to same virtual network but they wont communicate. Why ? Because on the same region, there are many datacenters, and i think that VNETs were not spanned through data-centers. After that, Virtual Networks model changed, and they become regional. So any created VNET since June 2014 was regional --> no need for Affinity Group anymore since VMs can communicate natively once they are connected to the same virtual network

- Resource Groups notion is not related to Affinity Group, it's related to Azure Resource Manger new concept and it's main goal is to regroup a set of Azure objects under a logical group to make easier RBAC and management.