Azure Appendix C: Azure virtual machine recommendations

Important: Customers should avoid the B-series burstable virtual machines because the Edge Appliance and NMC benefit from virtual machine types that provide sustained performance.

General purpose workloads

Most Nasuni Edge Appliance (NEA) use cases fit Azure's general purpose virtual machine type well. Virtual machines within the general purpose type provide a balanced and affordable CPU-to-memory ratio, while offering good uncached IOPS performance and throughput for disks.

Note: Nasuni uses the virtual machine's built-in temporary storage for the copy-on-write (COW) disk. All current generation Azure VM types (2020 and newer) no longer include temporary storage (for example, Ds_v4). However, Azure also offers corresponding virtual machine types that do include temporary storage (for example, Dds_v4), and these virtual machines should be used with Nasuni rather than a virtual machine without temporary storage.

The following table lists current and prior-generation virtual machine types that work well with Nasuni and include temporary storage for the COW:

High-Throughput Workloads

For high-throughput applications or dense user counts, it can sometimes be advantageous to deploy Azure virtual machines optimized for high remote storage throughput. The Ebsv5 Series virtual machines provide up to 4000 MBps of uncached disk throughput for Nasuni virtual machine operations (compared to ~1300 MBps throughput for general-purpose virtual machines). These virtual machines are more expensive than their general-purpose counterparts.