These updates range from patching software components in the hosting environment (like operating system, hypervisor, and various agents deployed on the host), upgrading networking components, to hardware decommissioning. IOPs is a different story. The solution example below uses an Azure Standard Storage Account v2 which is free (if no data is stored on there).

we cannot choose CPU speed, RAM & IOPS separately.

. Consider the cost as well, while giving a large volume. For that reason it has lower latency than attached disks. Azure is the only public cloud that offers an SLA for a single instance VM of 99.9%.

Let’s take the DSv2 series as an example (see https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virtual-machines-windows-sizes-general#dsv2-series). If hardware does fail, Microsoft will bring your VM up online ASAP in another rack automatically. I wanted to post a blog to shine some light on my experience of me talking to customers, some tips and tricks. The number of cores & RAM is a good starting point but you might need to oversize the VMs to satisfy other characteristics such as storage space, disk performance or network performance. Azure does not support attaching P60 (Un-Managed) as a disk to VMs at this time. In general:  IO intensive workloads (e.g. . This is reflected in the pricing columns.

To prevent the wasted space with most disks having large unused ranges with the fixed-format, Azure stores .vhd files in a sparse format, so you receive the benefits of both the fixed and dynamic disks at the same time. But it is a temporary disk. Using Server Manager UI, you can set the total number of columns up to 8 for a striped volume. It also doesn't include the cost of a resized disk. ), Licensed:  Red Hat Enterprise License (RHEL), R Server, SUSE, Temporary files (e.g. So if we are looking at a lot of cores and not much RAM, the F series is likely a better choice than D series and will not force us to oversize the RAM as much in order to have the right # of cores. Ultra SSD Managed Disks are billed on the provisioned sizes, provisioned IOPS and provisioned throughput. Azure has different flavours of licensed software (as of the writing of this article, i.e. virtual firewalls) will often require 2 NICs. Standard disks (at the time of this writing, March 2017), do not have IOPs documented but it is easy to find out by creating disks in the portal ; for instance an S4 disk with 32 GB will have 500 IOPs & 60 MB/s throughput. Unless you run such a workload, don’t rely on the temporary disk too much.

For example, if there are 16 disks in a single stripe set; specify 16 columns in the NumberOfColumns parameter of the New-VirtualDisk PowerShell cmdlet. So one of the first decision to do in pricing is:  do we want to go with integrated pricing or external licensed based pricing? We are insisting on this point because everybody gets confused on that column and for a good reason:  the column title is bunker. We can have bigger volumes on the VM by stripping multiple disks together on the VM’s OS.

Azure cores are dedicated cores. Finally, each VM SKU sports a different maximum number of Network Interface Controllers (NICs). It has also another very important characteristic:  it is ephemeral. From what I see, these would be the best match for each disk across AWS & Azure. There are two components in the price of a VM: The compute price corresponds to the CentOS Linux pricing since CentOS is open source and has no license fee.

For instance, for BizTalk Enterprise (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/biztalk-enterprise/), here in Canadian dollars in Canada East region for the F Series: In the OS column is the price of the compute + the Windows license while in the “Software” column is the price of the BizTalk Enterprise license. But both VMs are governed by the exact same update domain and fault domain – as per the below.

Learn more about Standard SSDs in our blog post. Note: I haven’t built any error handling or checking into this script, hence the above suggestion. As this blog post isn’t intended to cover Standard SSDs only, this is just where the attention is due to the date of publication of this blog – Standard SSDs are new. Going forward I recommend only managed disks.

Windows 2012 & Windows 2016 have the same license fee). More details here. Disk striping in Azure is a great way to save on costs…. At the time of this writing, the maximum size of a disk on a VM is 1TB. 7. They come in predefined packages with predefined specs:  SKUs, e.g. At the time of this writing Azure has the following VM series: Each series will optimize different ratios. LRS / GRS / RA-RGS, Premium / Standard, Cool / Hot, etc. For Microsoft to achieve the SLA for a single instance VM of 99.9%, you need to use VM with premium storage, which comes with a premium price tag, however it’s financially backed with the SLA.