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Premium Storage in RDS Hosting Deployments

By Thao Duong

Our automated provisioning process is now able to leverage Premium Storage, a high-demand feature that offers you high performance storage to store user profile data and session hosts’ OS disks. Premium Storage may be automatically selected based on your deployment size and the number of users, but you still have the freedom to customize this option to meet your needs.

Premium Storage: High-Performance Storage for Your Azure Desktop Hosting

Azure Premium Storage delivers high-performance, low-latency disk support for virtual machines running I/O-intensive workloads. Simply put, Premium Storage allows you to run a variety of performance intensive database workloads, such as SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, MySQL, and Redis. It is also recommended for enterprise applications, such as Dynamics AX, Dynamics CRM, and SharePoint Farms, which require consistent high performance and low latency in the cloud.

An Azure virtual machine supports attaching several Premium Storage disks, enabling up to 64 TB of storage per VM. With Premium Storage, your applications can achieve 80,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) per VM and 2000 MB per second disk throughput per VM with extremely low latencies for read operations.

How to implement Azure Premium Storage?

The provisioning process of Basic RDS, Basic Remote App, Standard RDS and Standard RemoteApp will ask two additional questions:

  • Premium Storage UPDs: whether to use Azure Premium Storage for User Profile Disks. This option will improve the disk access speed in larger deployments where many users will be making concurrent disk requests.
  • Premium Storage Session Hosts: This option allows you to choose whether to use Azure Premium Storage for session hosts’ OS disks. This option provides for better performance of the applications that run on the session hosts. Applications that demand high disk read/write operations will run smoother when utilizing premium storage.

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These two options will be automatically assigned based on the deployment type and the number of users, following our best RDS practices. Please remember that even though we may suggest Premium storage, you can adjust these settings to meet your deployment requirements.

Learn more about RDS Hosting provisioning process >>

What will happen in the back-end?

  • Going forward, Premium Storage options will have an impact on the allowed sizes for management and session host VMs. Whenever the premium storage option is set to Yes, the only allowed VM sizes will be the S tiers (DS, DS v2, GS and FS) – which provide faster processors, a higher memory-to-core ratio, and a solid-state drive (SSD) for the temporary disk. If the option is set to No, then the S tiers will be removed from the list and only regular tiers will be shown.
  • For Standard RDS and RemoteApp deployments, Premium Storage options will be set to Yes by default whenever the number of users exceeds 60. This will affect the allowed sizes for management and session hosts VMs and their preselected values.

Please note that this feature won’t impact existing deployments, any existing deployment that requires the use of Azure Premium Storage will be handled as a migration via a support request. Please open a support ticket and we will follow up with a timeframe for migrating your workload.

What features would you like to see next in the MyCloudIT platform? Let us know!

If you want to talk about your new Remote Desktop and Remote Application Hosting service, contact us today at sales@mycloudit.com or call us directly at 972-218-0715.

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Tags: MyCloudIT Product Updates

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