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Azure Virtual Machines

Score8.6 out of 10

95 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Azure Virtual Machines?

Virtual Machines (VMs) are available on Microsoft Azure, providing what is built as a low-cost, per-second compute service, available via Windows or Linux.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Azure Virtual Machines has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 95 ratings of Azure Virtual Machines's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Virtual machine automated provisioning

    Automation of virtual machine provisioning through use of vm templates

    Category average: 7.8

  • Live virtual machine backup

    Ability to backup vms without interrupting service

    Category average: 8

  • Live virtual machine migration

    Downtime minimization by migrating live vms between hosts and across clusters

    Category average: 7.9

Areas for Improvement

  • Hypervisor-level security

    Hypervisor-level security including antivirus and anti-malware

    Category average: 8.4

  • Management console

    Management console for central administration of vm environment

    Category average: 8

Reviews

What users are saying about Azure Virtual Machines.
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Azure Virtual Machines are a great choice for any task

Incentivized
Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I usually use them to host enterprise apps, or to test functionalities in conjunction and integration with other azure services. As part of a bigger solution. Depending on the app I also limit which services have access to it as well as specific users. Also love to use bastion besides rdp and ssh

Pros

  • Data science virtual machines
  • Hosting on premises apps
  • Integration with other azure services

Cons

  • Simplify the deployment
  • More offerings for virtual machines

Return on Investment

  • They are cheap
  • They integrate well with other azure products
  • Automated deployment is amazing

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Microsoft Azure Key Vault

Other Software Used

Microsoft Azure Key Vault, Azure Data Lake Storage

Why Azure Cloud Virtual Machines just is.

Incentivized
Allan Allitt
SRE in Information Technology at PA Media Group (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Azure Virtual Machines to mainly manage our end-user web platform utilizing its web app plans, we also sit VM servers behind this that contain the data for these web services along with some on-prem servers, we have a VPN direct to Azure and some VPNs direct to clients from our Azure services.

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.

Cons

  • Support on VMs doing strange things around NETUSE as a command resulted in constantly being sent over to INDIA where personally I found a real Language Barrier and even after specifically expressing a support service in the UK or the US it did keep finding its way back to a company called MINDTREE, the language barrier was such that after 4 or 5 meetings I was been asked the same questions that I was asked in the initial day 1 meeting and round and round it went, this issue was never resolved, we had to write code and utilize a different workaround to get over having to use the NETUSE command which previous to a VM running Windows server 2019 Datacentre worked fine.
  • Azure Pricing could be more competitive to AWS.
  • Having the ability to control app service plans which at the minute are just something that exists and we are not able to really see what they are doing which becomes an issue when you want to try and bug fix an issue.

Return on Investment

  • We actually saved £76,000 by utilising scaling services correctly from 24 hour uptime servers
  • WE saved £50,000 by Engaging NORDCLOUD and adding there professional discount with MICROSFT by going under there umbrella and they take over the support services to Microsoft.
  • Overall on a personal level I believe Cloud recourses are more expensive than Physical kits and the depreciation plan of physical kit really doesn't happen over 3 years, in reality, people still own kits at 20 years, I'm not saying that is good practice to keep the kit for 20 years but the cost model doesn't really work against what really happens in the world, so Cloud services are something that has pro's and cons and it really has to be what your needing and how your company processes work when trying to gain new kit, it can be far easier to commission a new virtual machine in Azure than it can be to get purchasing to investigate raise orders and actually buy the kit you require, once the process is set up for the Azure purchases the route is already in place and happens much quicker, sometimes, it's even been retrospective as its needed and been provisioned, resolving a priority 1 issue and then decommissioned after the event. you would have to look at what your own personal situation is on this and if this is a benefit or not.

Other Software Used

Veritas Backup Exec, Chef Infra, Dynatrace, Kubernetes Dashboard

Databricks on Azure VMs

Karan DuaView profile
Senior Machine Learning Engineer in Engineering at Oracle (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used Azure Virtual Machines in my last organization for deploying out Machine Learning model and related workloads on virtual machines. Our requirement was to enable automated deployment of our compute engine - Databricks, our ML models, and Airflow workflows on scalable virtual machines and Azure Virtual Machines was our choice in the last organization I worked with.

Pros

  • Rapid Scalability
  • Variety of elastic storage options
  • Flexibility and control for app deployment
  • Regular Updates for security and feature upgrades
  • Fault tolerance
  • Native Integration with Databricks

Cons

  • Pricing can be a bit better
  • Compute types can be increased (AWS EC2 has more)
  • No Bare metal GPU instances as in OCI

Return on Investment

  • Native Databricks deployment and upgradation was a breeze
  • Peace of mind with regards fault tolerance and automated backups
  • Native availability of Windows VMs made it easy to migrate Windows based on prem systems.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)

Azure Virtual Machines

Incentivized
Dima KazavchinskyView profile
System and DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at CyberProof (201-500 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

In our company, all of the VM infrastructure used for production and corporate needs is in the Azure cloud and we Use Azure Virtual Machines for all of our needs. The only exception, when we don't use this product in the Azure cloud, is when we use Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Azure Virtual Machines come with different hardware configurations and it can suit any need - there are small VMs for testing and DEV and there are very large VMs as well built for higher performance of the production environment.

Pros

  • You can login to Azure VMs using SSO with your Azure Ad account
  • Azure VMs are securely accessible from anywhere in the world, with Azure Bastion
  • You can execute scripts on the VM from the Azure portal without logging in to it

Cons

  • No hot plug available when increasing VM hardware
  • SSO for Windows WMs is somewhat limited

Return on Investment

  • Positive: pricing - reservations are available to further decrease costs
  • Positive: pricing - you are only paying when VM is up

Alternatives Considered

vSphere and Azure Container Instances

Azure VMs are good value for money

Incentivized
Filip GrasheskiView profile
DevOps Engineer in Information Technology at Deutsche Börse (10,001+ employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMs for many different purposes:

- Isolated development machines for working with Azure cloud services.

- Hosting Jenkins master server used to deploy our Azure-based applications.

- Hosting Jenkins agents for CI/CD pipelines which are built on separate VNETs for dev, test, sim, and prod.

- Azure Data Factory integration runtime to run ADF pipelines.

Pros

  • Very easy to spin up.
  • Low amount of maintenance.
  • Low cost when using reserved instances.
  • Flexible in terms of supported OSs.

Cons

  • Additional security risk that needs to be managed.
  • Complexity to make replicas of a VM.
  • Potentially build and forget in larger enterprises which will drain money.

Return on Investment

  • Allowed developers to use machines without the necessity of purchasing additional hardware.
  • Paying for computing and storage for distributed systems as opposed to self-hosted hardware would be more expensive.

Alternatives Considered

Amazon EC2 Auto Scaling

Other Software Used

Azure Data Factory, Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS)