Looking through the posts on this site, I don't see too many people calling out IO performance issues with Azure. But I am having one. I don't know if it's something I did that is less than optimal or if I am just not getting enough resources on the cloud.
We have a number of Windows Server virtual machines that we use for .NET and Java development and QA. I find Azure attractive for the obvious reasons but mainly for the opportunity to reduce non-productive hours spent on environmental maintenance.
So with that in mind I converted one of our Win 7 virtual machines from ESXi to Hyper-V, ran sysprep and uploaded the image to Azure. There I created an A3 virtual machine using the image, established a VPN connection back home, joined the machine to the domain and began to run through various activities to see how well it worked. Note that an A3 machine closely approximates the specs of the machine when configured locally.
Functionally, after cleaning up system id issues with some of the apps (licensing, et al.) all is fine. Performance is another matter.
Here is the issue:
This particular machine takes about 2 minutes to build its solution when running on either Hyper-V or ESXi. The host servers are home built generic machines using on board raid 1. In other words they are not beefy enterprise configurations.The Azure A3 machine is taking up to 12 minutes to perform the same build. The resource Monitor shows that most of the time the machine is in IO wait reading the disk.
Is there something I should be doing differently or should I expect better performance from local machines in all cases?
BigTFromAZ