As the underdog competing against ESX, Microsoft had to make it easy for businesses to adopt Hyper-V. By hooking up Hyper-V to the Windows management OS, they

As the underdog competing against ESX, Microsoft had to make it easy for businesses to adopt Hyper-V. By hooking up Hyper-V to the Windows management OS, they get to leverage Windows device drivers. And this, in turn, ensures broader hardware compatibility. Of course, this goal became unnecessary for Azure, where Microsoft controls the hardware. But Hyper-V had already been designed that way. Certainly, Server Core is pretty stripped-down. The Russinovich blog says they reboot about once a month, but the Azure support blog says they reboot every 2-3 months. http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wats/archive/2013/09/24/windows-azure-virtual-machine-restarted-or-shutdown-with-out-any-notification.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/wats/archive/2013/09/24/windows-azur...