Likelihood to Recommend If you want to host a dedicated Windows server on the cloud, and especially if you want to integrate it with your on premises Active Directory, Azure Virtual Machines should be your first choice. Obviously running Linux on Azure works very well too, but given Azure's pricing is not the cheapest, there are other providers out there that have a better cost-benefit ratio for Linux. That said, hosting Windows on Azure can be affordable (especially when compared to other providers) if you plan your licensing, topology, and application architecture correctly.
Read full review With proper design, VMware NSX can and should be deployed to virtually any VMware virtualization environment, but the deployment should be tailored to the needs of that environment. There isn't really a one size fits all deployment design for all environments. That versatility is what provides its greatest strength to a business.
Read full review Pros When demand is high, we scale the service out, eg During a Football Match. When a football match is over and the throughput of data from OPTA drops we save by the service scaling back in. Our App Service Plans along with the Clean C# code are lightening fast giving a good customer experience. When producing the TV Guide information and a program overruns its scheduled time, a client can instantly be updated to the new programming schedule as our change is instant and its in the right place for all the clients to download and adjust their television guides appropriately to send out to the public giving a 24x7 uptime service that is precise and accurate and resilient to outages due to failover zones around the world. Read full review End to end encryption on the wire. Micro-segmentation. Integrates well with existing VMWare environment. Integrates well with our existing network. Read full review Cons Pricing can be a concern if you are truly agnostic to which cloud you are building your particular solution in. The UI, as is the case with any cloud provider, is crowded. As with any cloud provider, it can be difficult to tune in exactly the right amount of servers for your needs...you might find yourself under/overprovisioning. Read full review Interoperability in multi-vendor environments Advanced networking and packet acceleration options can be improved Read full review Support Rating I give the overall support for Azure Virtual Machines a 7 because I think while the overall support do a great job there are still areas that it could improve on such as efficiency and speed. So while I only give it a 7 and it has some issues it is still better than the overall support at
Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling .
Read full review Alternatives Considered Azure Virtual Machines offer unparalleled flexibility in provisioning, managing and upgrading the VM instances, both manually and programmatically. AVM offer very granular billing options and enables high costs optimisations (while still being costly). The other competitors I mentioned are very good at offering dead-cheap VMs. But if you need anything beyond that, especially for big computing, you need Azure Virtual Machines.
Read full review We use both
Cisco ACI and VMware NSX, and while they have different strengths and capabilities, I would recommend VMware NSX, as it can be used in all VMware environments, without costly physical infrastructure changes.
Cisco ACI provides some of the same capabilities, but not all. It's focus relies on physical networking changes.
Read full review Return on Investment It's so easy to spin up new instances, that it becomes also to easy to have to many of them to manage. Many teams end up with a couple of hundreds of VMs after a short while, making the whole thing very hard to maneuver Azure VMs are the next step for us to rely on Onprem servers, and leaving the management of the infrastructure to the professionals The ease of use, is also important when our main focus is to deliver new applications and integrations fast, and not having to worry about infrastructure. We sell bottles, not CPUs Read full review Ability to move workloads more easily with the ability to stretch/move networks across multiple physical locations. The added flexibility allows you to expedite tech refreshes since you're no longer constrained by the hardware. Read full review ScreenShots