Azure Portal and VM Sizes

Azure Portal and VM Sizes

 

1. There are following 2 portals for managing azure
1. Https://manage.windowsazure.com (Azure Management Portal)
2. Https://portal.azure.com (New Portal) 

2. Available credits and billing  can be checked from both the portals
3. Introduction to Startboard
4. Listing of services is called the sidebar
5. Sidebar does have a combination of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS services.
6. Different tiles in new portals are called start board. In new portal if you click on Service health you can see all the services in Azure and their health. And it also show in which all region the respective service is available
7. When you click on a service and the new windows pops up that is called blade
8. All objects or components getting created in Azure should have unique names. All the names get validated with the existing name from *.Core.windows.net
9. Best way to get used to new https://portal.azure.com is to compare what we see in https://manage.windowsazure.com 

10. Azure Trial Subscription provides the following (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/free/?WT.srch=1&WT.mc_id=SEM_PB1LsJKE?wt.mc_id=AID_SEM_&)
1. Provision upto 14 VM, 40 SQL DB or 8 TBs of storage for a Month
2. Build Web, mobile and API Apps that use Redis cache, search or CDN
3. Harness Big Data with machine learning, streaming Analytics and Hadoop
4. Create real time IoT apps with monitoring and Anomaly detection  

11. VM Sizes

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virtual-machines-windows-sizes?toc=%2fazure%2fvirtual-machines%2fwindows%2ftoc.json#size-tables

1. As on date Azure VM are available in following series
• A Series
• Av2
• D Series
• Dv2
• DS
• DSv2
• F Series
• FS
• G Series
• GS
• H Series
• N Series
• NV
• NC
• L  Series
2. What VM type is right for my application
• Dev Test environment
• HPC (High Performance Computing)
• Enterprise Applications
• Large scale Data workloads 

3. A-Series Family (Classic VM Size):
• This is also called as Classic VM size. This is also known as Highest value VM size
• Characteristics are Highest Value VM Size, General Purpose and High Memory options
• A-Series does have 3 flavour of VMs:
• A0-A4 (General Purpose)
• A5-A7 (High Memory requirements)
• A8-A11 (HPC)
• A0-A4 also comes in two flavour i.e. basic and standard.
• Basic are very vanilla type of VM. It is slightly less powerful, but still fully functional the only difference is that basic doesn’t support Azure Load balancing
• A8-A9 use audio magnetic which is helpful for fast transaction    

4. D-Series
• Why it is called as D Series and not B. B sound to be more of basic, C is used by competitors and then MS decided to use D (Series)
• 60% faster CPU
• Upto 112GB Memory
• Local SSD storage: this gives 5 times the performance of the spinning disk drives on A Series
• D-Series brings in the concept of Premium storage. D-Series already had standard storage.
• Standard Storage
• Optimised for General Purpose Storage
• Upto 20000 IOPS and 20GBPS per storage account
• Billing based on actual bytes written to storage
• BLOB, Files, Tables and Queues
• Premium Storage (Low Latency and High Bandwidth Connections)
• Optimised for Low Latency and High Bandwidth
• Upto 64000 IOPS and 64GBPS per storage account
• Billing based on Provisioned Size (Not Actual Writes)
• BLOB Only
• These are available with DS Series VM
• Can attach upto 32TB of storage per VM 

• Primary Storage Caching
• These are available with DS Series VM
• Can attach upto 32TB of storage per VM
• 64000 IOPS per VM
• 50000 IOPS per disk
• ~5 ms read/write (no Cache)
• Less than 1 ms read latency (Cache) 

• Re-Size a Azure VM
• Login to https://Portal.azure.com
• Select the VM
• Click All Settings and click Sizes
• Under Sizes you will see all available sizes for VM Re-sizing.
• Certain VM sizes are not available for VM Re-size, that’s only because of the Scale Limit. This limitation is only in Gen 1 VMs
• Gen 2 VM can be re-sized to any size provided that respective region supports that size

• G-Series ( This is known as Gorilla Series)
• Optimised for Data Workloads
• Upto 32 CPU Cores (These are physical cores), 448 GB RAM, 6.5 TB local SSD
• Latest Generation Intel Processor
• Premium Storage is also supported in GS Series

 

7. N-Series (Preview)
•  Earlier in August 2016, Microsoft announced the preview release of their new GPU-powered N-series VM sizes. With both a visualization SKU and a compute-focused SKU, these VM sizes offer unparalleled performance for desktop graphical modelling/rendering and deep learning computational models.
8. L-Series –
• L-series are storage-optimized VMs specially designed for applications requiring low latency, high throughput, large local disk storage such as NoSQL databases (e.g. Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis), and data warehousing. Built on Intel Haswell processors (Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3), L-series supports up to 6 TB of local SSD and offers unmatched storage performance. MS will be rolling out L-series in the coming weeks.
9. H-Series
• Aligned with Microsoft's commitment to deliver the best performing technology to market, H-series supports the fastest CPUs in public cloud as well as RDMA with InfiniBand, so customers can run high performance computing (HPC) applications like computational fluid dynamics, automotive crash testing, genome and molecular research. H-Series VMs provides customers the ability to easily get on-demand HPC infrastructure and use it for faster insight.

10. Classic Portal can just deploy Version 1 Virtual machines. However, new portal can create both Version 1 and Version 2 VM. (This is not the Gen 1 and Gen 2 VM)

 

11. Azure VM Readiness Assessment tool:

The Virtual Machines Readiness Assessment tool will automatically inspect your on-premises environment, whether it is physical or virtualized, and provide you with a check list and detailed report on steps you need to take to move your environment to the cloud. 

12. The F-series also introduces a new standard in VM size naming for Azure. For this series and VM sizes released in the future, the numeric value after the family name letter will match the number of CPU cores. Additional capabilities, such as optimized for premium storage, will be designated by letters following the numeric CPU core count. This naming format will be used for future VM sizes released but will not retroactively change the names of any existing VM sizes which have been released.