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 Vsphere Operation Management is suitable for automating the process of bringing up an alternate data center in case of a disaster. It also is a great way for testing your readiness of disaster. You have the ability to bring up a server in a "bubble" for testing. This way you can show your admins how the failover process will work.
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 The best thing about VSOM is that it's built into VCenter so you only have one point of administration VSOM does a great job of making applications intuitive Re-IPing virtual machines are a must and VSOM does a great job of making this a simple process 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 The installation of VSOM is very tedious It uses an MS SQL database It should be able to adjust for hardware modifications in VCenter 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 vSphere with Operations Management has a much better way of automating the re-IPing of servers so you can stand them up in a different environment or location. You do, however, need another way of replicating your servers to your DR site, VSOM will not do that. We used EMC Recover Point for replication.
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 In the case of a disaster, the ROI would be substantial. The license for VSOM is pretty expensive initially. Support for VSOM is terrific. Read full review ScreenShots