Tuesday, September 23, 2014

SSD-based instances for Azure VMs and Cloud Services announced


New SSD-based instances for Azure VMs and Cloud Services

Love to read this, Azure now offering D-Series for virtual machines and cloud services, hoping it will help improve the performance of Azure based infrastructure and services. However, it wasn't all good news, the SSDs will only be available for the temporary drives (D drive, for caching/buffering purposes). So in essence we still have to wait to get SSD based C (primary) drives.

As I wrote in one of my recent post  it is a serious issue when you do not get the output from the infrastructure that you expect on the basis of the h/w configuration. In my experiment my sony vaio machine (dual core with 8GB ram) completely outperformed my Azure VM (8 cores, 14GB ram). I believe disk i/o could be a major factor as the sony machine was running on SSDs.

This is from one of my Azure VM running SharePoint 2013 (with just a basic site) and hosted in Southeast Asia, showing how the disk was performing (yet to do a comprehensive test in machines in other MS datacenters)




this is what Microsoft says about their new D-Series 

"These instances have solid-state disk (SSD)-based local drives and faster processors relative to many of the A-series instances. The D-series instances can be used as VMs, as well as web or worker roles in Cloud Services, and are well suited for applications that demand faster CPU performance, local disk performance, or higher memories. Please note that the SSD drives in the D-series are non-persistent. "

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/09/22/new-d-series-virtual-machine-sizes/