What Azure Virtual Machine size should I pick?!?

Introduction

Remember the last time you went shopping for a shirt? Then you surely also recall the moment in time when you were looking to find the right shirt size for yourself…

You probably also noticed that sizes might differ a bit depending on the context. A  woman’s size vs & men’s size is totally different. There are geographical differences… and some people just like to wear cloths that have more “free space”.

So is today’s post about buying cloths? Hell no… 😉 But it’s to point out that there are analogies between finding the right shirt for you, and finding the right Azure Virtual Machine. Today we’ll delve into the aspects that will guide you a given T-shirt size in Azure ; for instance, why choose an FS1 above an A1_V2, where they both have 1 core & 2GB of memory. Though there is a price difference of 10€ per month on them.

Azure : How to prepare for maintenance impacting your Virtual Machines

Introduction

A topic that’s often discussed in workshops is “Availability Sets“. And during that topic, a question/comment that pops up every time ; “Can I schedule the maintenance for my VMs, because…”. Today we’ll delve into that part.

 

Why do we need maintenance?

For some this might seem like a very odd question to pose and that is a given fact of life. Though some organisations live by the mantra “if it isn’t broke, why fix it”, and once a systems gets deployed, they’ll (try) never to touch it again…

Network virtualization ; Do I go for NVGRE or VXLAN with vNext?

With Windows 2016 / vNext the network virtualization has made a fundamental change… In 2012 Microsoft only supported its own NVGRE protocol. With the upcoming release, Microsoft will support both NVGRE and VXLAN! It even goes so far that VXLAN will be the default protocol. So in terms of VHS vs Betamax, we can conclude that Microsoft has decided that the market is more in favor of VXLAN.
  
What does that mean for organizations that have already implementee NVGRE? Both protocols will be supported by the typical Mellanox of Chelsio adapters in terms of translations. The HNV (Hyper-V Network Virtualization) will also support both simultaneously. Though if you are looking to start a new implementation, it is best to go for VXLAN now!