This is the closest in price to the A4 and contains less temp storage and fewer cores, but the temp storage is SSD. This is about the minimum specs (cores and memory) I would use for SQL.ĭ3 ($0.684/hr): 4 cores, 14 GB of RAM, 200 GB of temp storage, attack up to 8 data drives (500 IOPs limit/drive). Server Specs (not including DS series machines and I haven’t tested them yet)Ī4 Standard ($0.72/hr): 8 cores, 14 GB of RAM, 605 GB of temp storage, attach up to 16 data drives (500 IOPs limit/drive). Since 8K is the standard block size for Disks in Windows (and quite frankly what most people actually use) I wanted to do a test using that block size as well.

As it is recommended you format your drive with 64K block size for SQL Server when using it for SharePoint, that was my primary focus. With both the 64K and the 8K test, the drives were formated to match the block size of the test. To get the Disk Numbers you can run Get-Disk in PowerShell. Notice the ` before the # to escape what is normally a comment. If you wish to use PowerShell to run the command you must run diskspd.exe -b64k -d30 -t8 -o8 `#. This command can be run in a command prompt. The command I used when testing disks was diskspd.exe -b64k -d30 -t8 -o8 #. Servers I will test and post results on once I have access to premium storage are: DS3 and the DS14. The A4 Standard, the D3, the G2 and the G5 (this one is the one with 32 cores and 448GB of RAM). The only difference is the number of data disks you can attach to the various machines. In the case of Azure, you can always spin up a larger VM (up to 32 cores and 448GB of RAM! Yes, Gigabytes!), but they all use the same disks for data (at least until the premium storage becomes available). For SQL and SharePoint, disk performance is important. These test were exclusively testing Azure VM Disks and Disk configuration options.

I’ll touch on some of my thoughts around this in the results section. However, the results could be used to analyze the possibility of using the Azure IaaS for other applications as well. As a result, the performance testing, results and conclusions have a slant towards SharePoint and SQL. This was the beginning of my process for setting up a SharePoint farm on Azure. There will be a second post here (link place holder) that will go over in more detail how to configured the disks for testing, primarily the disk striping, as more of a How-To post.

This post is simply going to cover some of the results I discovered while doing some testing of Virtual Machines (VMs) in Azure using their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

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