I want to use the premium storage for better performance.
I am using it for BLOBS and i need the fastest blob access for reading.
I am using the reading and writing of the blobs only internally within the data center
I create a premium storage and checked it vs the standard storage by reading a blob of 10 MB 100 times in different location using seek method (reading 50 kb each time).
I read it using a VM machine with windows server 2012
the result are the same - around 200 ms.
Do i need to do something else ? like attach the storage ? if so how do i attach the storage.
both the vm and the storage are at the same region
You can use Premium Storage blobs directly via the REST API. Performance will be better that Standard Storage blobs. Perf difference may not be obvious in some cases if there is local caching on the application or when the blob is too small. Here 10MB blob size is tiny compared to the performance limits. Can you retry with a larger blob? Like, 10 GB? Also note that Premium Storage model is not optimized for tiny blobs.
Well, in Virtual machine cases it always rely on your main Physical HDD, unless you will used that premium storage it's plus but i think internet connection matters as well.
By default, there is a temporary storage(SSD) provided with each VM. This temporary storage drive is present on the physical machine which is hosting your VM and hence can have higher IOPS and lower latency when compared to the persistent storage like data disk.
For test, we can create a VM with HDD disk, and attach a SSD to this VM. After it complete, we can install some tools to measure disk performance, in this way, we can find the difference between HDD and SSD.
like attach the storage ? if so how do i attach the storage.
We can via Azure new portal to attach a SSD to this VM.
More information about attach disk to VM, please refer to this link.
Related
I have deployed a Data Science Virtual Machine on Azure on an N-series instance, which comes with a Standard HDD as the Storage Account Type.
However I would like to include an SSD, but I have not been able to do so.
What I have tried: In the Virtual Machine menu, on Disks, I can attach an extra disk, and create a new one, but it only allows for standard storage disk (HDD) and the option for a premium (SSD) is blocked.
Creating a new storage account I can select a premium storage (SSD), however I cannot link this to my existing VM. This new storage account does not appear between the options when choosing to attach a new disk.
Any help?
Unfortunately the solution is that you may have to use NCv2 or NCv3 which supports premium storage (SSD) and more faster GPU processors (Nvidia P100, V100). Another alternative is to create a separate blob on premium storage and mount that on a Ubuntu DSVM using blobfuse that comes prebuilt into the Ubuntu DSVM. BTW - The NC6 also comes with locally attached temporary storage on SSD (340GB) so you can use it for staging. The data will not presist across reboots. So it is only suitable for work files and will need to be explictly copied to persistent storage. Hope one of these options work for your scenario.
I created a Azure Virtual Machine and it in turn created a temporary storage drive for me (D:). Now, If I have C:, D:, E:,F: drive in my VM how can I differentiate which is Azure temporary Storage which is not.
I have tried to Use DeviceType=3 but it lists all the Logical Drives.
I'm assuming you're talking about Virtual Machines (you didn't specify). For VMs:
Your OS disk is backed by durable blob storage. All the time. For Windows, this is approx. 127GB. For Linux, this is approx. 32GB.
Your temp drive is always in-chassis, and at risk. The temp disk size is advertised in the VM sizing specs.
Beyond that: You'd be taking the specific action of mounting additional disks, which are all durable, blob-backed. So you'll know exactly which drives there are.
After some research, it looks there isn't any programmatic way to identify the Azure temporary drive. May be the hack is to look for "DATALOSS_WARNING_README.txt" file in all the drives.
Is it's possible to attach the same premium storage to multiple VMs so the files stored in the storage can be access in all of them.
The idea is to have a VM optimized for CPU that will calculate something and write results to the storage and have a low cost VM that will read the results and do other operations.
So if by saying "same" you mean same storage account - yes, you can do that, if by "same" you mean same VHD, no, you cant simultaneously attach same VHD to different VM's.
But you can have Azure Storage Files take on that role, it works like an SMB share, were you can store the results and other nodes will read them. Or you could just create a share on some VM that is supposed to read the results and store the results there.
Either way, its perfectly doable.
I have a virtual machine running Windows on Microsoft Windows Azure. I am noticing that one of the hard drives shows as completely full. Do these drives automatically expand as data is added, or do I need to increase storage, and if so--how?
Thanks for any tips.
In Azure, both the OS Disk and any attached Data Disks are fixed format VHDs. They are not resized automatically and, in fact, there is no supported process to modify the size. Since these disks are allocated using sparse storage - i.e., you are only billed for space actually used - the general recommendation is to use 1TB disks. If the disk is empty you will not be billed.
Windows Server 2012 provides TRIM support which clears the space occupied in Azure Storage by deleted files. Without this support there could still be a charge for files which have been deleted from the filesystem but which still occupy pages in the page blob backing the VHD in Azure Storage.
Martin Balliauw has written up instructions for modifying the size of a VHD in Azure. He has also created a utility that helps with this task. This comes with a do it at your own risk warning.
I am confused about the Azure VM setup. I am trying to setup a SQL Server and the guidelines suggest that if your DBs are larger than 10GB, that you should setup a seperate Data Disk in Azure Storage. But all the documentation explicitly says not to use the D: Temporary Storage as it is volatile across reboots.
I completely understand this. The issue I have is that when I create a new VM, (I just created a SQL 2012 Web on 2008 R2 SP1 from the gallery), I get a single C: drive of about 128GB. When I then attach an empty data disk through the portal, it appears as D: and is called Temporary Storage.
My understanding is that this drive is not temporary storage (volatile) as I have created it through the portal as a data disk.
Is this a hangover from a past Azure configuration? I gather the VMs used to come with a 30GB OS drive but now come with a 128GB OS drive. Is this something to do with it?
I'm pretty confused!
The way it works, the D drive is the 70GB temp (volatile) drive (at least with Windows Server 2012):
Here, I just attached an empty disk and refreshed the windows Server disk manager. I then go to format it:
Once formatted, my new 20GB disk is assigned to F (and I still have a 70GB temp drive). This drive, backed by blob storage, is durable.
When you are using Azure VMs - the OS drive & the Data drives are backed by Azure Blob Storage (the VHDs are Page Blobs). The OS disk size limit during most of the CTP was 10GB, but was raised around the time the feature shipped to the larger 128GB. The deciding factor for Data Drive/No Data Drive/Lots of Data Drives (Max = 16) for SQL is more a function of your IOPS requirements than either the size of the DB corpus or the relative drive size.
For SQL workloads in a VM, I would strongly recommend reviewing:
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=306266
This is a performance paper based on the latest Azure bits, developed by the SQL team (updated June 2013).
Pat
In the interest of providing an answer to this question.
I think it was just an anomoly. #DavidMakogon helped me go through what was expected and it seems that my first VM simply didn't initialize the Temporary Drive on first boot, so this caused lots of confusion.
It's all working as expected now.