Size of VM

Question

Hello Azure-Community,

I am currently adjusting the configuration of our IT infrastructure to Azure and have come across a few questions. I am grateful for any help in this regard.

1.) We are currently using DS1_v2 for our staging environment and have very little workload. Which VM size would be better suited? I had thought about B2s or B1s.

2.) For our Main Environment we are using DS2_v2. We always have a low cpu usage. Should we downgrade to DS1_v2 ?

Kind regards

Answer 1

Regarding 1.:
I would start with a B1s and increase to B2s if required

Regarding 2.:
I would give it a try with a DS1_v2. You are able to increase the size if required any time.
You should just verify the other stats of the VMS like IOPS and network bandwith are ok for you as well.

Maybe this is helpful.

Regards

Andreas Baumgarten

(Please don't forget to Accept as answer if the reply is helpful)

Answer 2

Hi,

It may be difficult for us to answer this, without knowing what workloads are being run and how much resources they use, every environment is unique.

In your case I would monitor your servers for a few days up to a week or two, you could for example set up Performance Monitors on your servers for a few days/weeks and then get more detailed results about how much of your resources are being utilized. From this information you can then make a better conclusion to how much performance you really need for your Azure virtual machines.

Remember one thing, when migrating your workloads to the cloud it does not mean that you need to have the exact same sized virtual machines in the cloud.

You can have a look at the link below to get some more information for what purpose the different Azure VM sizes and types are optimal for:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/sizes

In general it is easier to add more resources later if needed, so you could go with smaller size to start with.

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to accept as answer, thank you)

Best regards,
Leon

Answer 3

Leon Laude's and Andreas Baumgarten's advices are excellent. Personally I never configure Windows Server with one core. Two cores make the servers a lot more responsive. I see from our customers that they usually are happy to start with burstable machines (B2). Cloud computing is all about scalability, elasticity and agility. It's easy to scale up and out.