Azure Virtual Machine vs dedicated server

Question

I need to provide a desktop application up to 10 users. This application is a ERP, basically database mining and reporting. I will use Windows Server to offer support to concurrent users via Remote Desktop Connection.

Do somebody have experience comparing the performance between Azure Virtual Machine and a dedicated server?

At the present, I use Azure, but changing the settings to a powerful machine does not seem to affect to the time to generate reports, specially when the application needs to read the database or load the dlls for first .

Answer 1

I used both systems and I prefer Azure, it's cheapest and you shouldn't worry about some things that you should if you have your own server on premise.

Anyway, I recommend you Azure RemoteApp, it's a new feature, introduced at the last build by Microsoft and it's more powerful if you only need that feature of your server.

Changing IaaS to SaaS, maybe you should consider that option for this service.

https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com

H.

Answer 2

If scaling up the size of the Azure VM doesn't help improve performance then your issue is almost certainly not going to be due to the virtualized environment itself, which means that moving to a dedicated server most likely won't fix the issue.

I would suggest a couple options:

1. Consider checking out RemoteApp (http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/RemoteApp/). This is a dedicated offering specifically for what you are trying to accomplish.
2. Investigate where the perf problem is coming from and fix that issue rather than randomly changing environments. If database lookups are slow - is the database on the same server as the app or is it remote? have you created appropriate indexes? have you gone through the SQL Server on Azure VM Performance best practices whitepaper (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn133149.aspx)?

Answer 3

Your environment sounds similar to ours - datawarehousing with online reporting. We considered switching from a dedicated server to azure, but after some evaluation, we discovered that our MySQL / PHP reports took about twice as long as our relatively low specification dedicated server. So we are currently sticking with dedicated server running windows server 2012.