Microsoft has been consistently increasing its market share in the cloud computing market. The tech giant enjoys a unique competitive edge in the market, as it owns the highly popular Windows operating system as well.
The other reason for the success of Windows based cloud offerings is that Cloud Hosted Virtual Machines (VM) come in a wide range of pre-configured options. This makes the task of choosing the optimal virtual machine much easier for the enterprises.
Deploying enterprises also have the option to provision a customized Virtual Machine (VM) over the Azure cloud platform by Microsoft. Now, let us discuss some of the most basic types of Azure Virtual Machines (VM) that you can provision.
Related: Microsoft Re-brands Windows Virtual Desktop as Azure Virtual Desktop
Entry Level
As the name suggests, these Azure powered VMs have been designed for some of the most basic workloads. These entry level VMs are most suited for test and development environments, which are mostly still a “work in progress” and are not resource intensive.
Burstable
These types of VMs are also quite suggestive by their very name. Although these VMs are primarily meant for lower CPU usage, they still have the inherent capability to ramp up their processing power as and when its required, making them suitable for servers.
General Purpose
These VMs are defined by fast CPUs, ample memory and a higher local disk performance. Such ramped up performance specs make these general purpose virtual machines highly suited for production workloads and similar use cases.
Data Protection
Whether its sensitive business data, mission critical applications or confidential code, all of these require secure environments from where to operate. This high level of protection is achieved via encryption, which protects such data both in transit and at rest.
Related: Microsoft Rolls Out Enhancements to Windows Virtual Desktop Platform
Optimized Memory
This class of virtual machines for ideal for executing memory intensive workloads and applications. These VMs are highly suitable for managing relational databases requiring large caches and memory intensive analytics.
Related: The difference between VMs and containers in Windows Server 2016
Compute Optimized
This class of VMs is designed with high CPU to memory ratios, making them suitable for enterprise workloads involving data analytics, gaming and servers. Such VMs deliver higher resilience for servers, which can experience large surges in user activity in a short while.
High Memory and Storage
These types of VMs come equipped with ample memory and Solid State Drive (SSD) storage, which is both fast and robust. These high spec VMs are suitable for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and database management workloads.
High Performance Computing (HPC)
Not long ago, this was a domain where cloud hosted solutions were not the main preference, but all this has now changed. These VMs perform resource intensive workloads like risk analysis models, quantum simulation and rendering etc.
Storage Optimized
These VMs have ramped up memories and are ideal for applications and workloads that require minimal latency. Warehousing applications and transactional databases can be deemed as the most suitable use cases for this class of VMs.
Related: A Few Initial thoughts about the Windows 365 Platform
GPU Equipped
As the name suggests, this class of VMs is very suitable for graphics intensive workloads, gaming, architectural applications and video editing etc. Their performance is nearly as good as high end PCs equipped with powerful graphics processing hardware.
Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)
Recently, Microsoft has re-branded the Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD) and Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). This is the latest offering by the tech giant that aims to offer virtualized desktops and applications to end users, as well as enterprises.
Microsoft’s popular suite of enterprise productivity tools, which is now branded as Office 365, can also be integrated with AVD. You can consider AVD as a combination of all the different classes of Virtual Machines (VM) that we have discussed above.
If you are in the market for a Windows based Cloud Hosted Virtual Desktop solution that is secure, reliable, customizable and readily scalable, you don’t need to look any further than leading Cloud Service Provider (CSP) dinCloud.
