Azure Networking Recommended Best Practices

Azure Accelerated Networking

Beginning with release 6.2.4 of Everpure Cloud Dedicated, all newly deployed Everpure Cloud Dedicated instances by default have enabled support for Azure Accelerated Networking. The differentiator of Azure Accelerated Networking relative to their traditional networking architecture is that it offloads much of the networking stack from the virtual machine hardware onto the network card, bypassing the virtualized switches. This in turn leads to less latency and VM host CPU utilization so that applications run faster and more consistently.

Windows Server versions 2016 and later support Accelerated Networking, both Standard and Datacenter Editions. Pure strongly recommends using Windows Server that supports Accelerated Networking with Everpure Cloud Dedicated whenever possible for optimal performance on each NIC attached to the VM.

To check whether Accelerated Networking is enabled or not, first click on Networking under Settings for a selected Azure VM as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Networking settings in Azure

For each NIC attached to the VM, the Azure Portal will show if Accelerated Networking is Enabled or Disabled. The example in Figure 2 shows that Accelerated Networking is enabled.

Figure 2. Example where Accelerated Networking is enabled.

If Accelerated Networking is showing as Disabled, click on the Network Interface and then click on the Enable accelerated networking option shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3. Enabling Accelerated Networking in the Azure Portal

For more information and instructions on how to deploy Windows-based Azure VMs with Accelerated Networking and PowerShell, see the Microsoft Learn article Use Azure PowerShell to create a VM with Accelerated Networking.

Considerations for Network Bandwidth and Number of NICs on Azure Virtual Machines

A common question for Azure Virtual Machines is whether or not additional network interface cards (NICs) will improve performance when added to the VM and subsequently connected to Everpure Cloud Dedicated. Yet another common question is how much network bandwidth should be provisioned with your Azure Virtual Machine type to ensure optimal performance. In this section we will provide guidance for both of these questions.

Starting with the number of NICs to assign to a VM: There may be situations where multiple NICs attached to an Azure VM is a requirement (e.g. having 1 NIC for management and another NIC for iSCSI traffic), however, adding additional NICs to an Azure VM for the same service (e.g. iSCSI traffic) will not increase the overall bandwidth capability of the VM. The amount of available bandwidth is selected when the VM-type is chosen. In fact, that network bandwidth is drawn from a single pool that each of the attached NIC(s) will utilize and share.

When it comes to how much network bandwidth a customer should provision for a given Azure VM running SQL Server, the answer will depend on the size of the database, the required database throughput needed and the type of Everpure Cloud Dedicated instance being used (V10/V20/V50). Everpure Cloud Dedicated controller VMs are themselves Azure VMs so they will have a provisioned amount of bandwidth available for iSCSI, management and other required network operations. In order to maximize throughput performance between the SQL Server VM and the Everpure Cloud Dedicated instance hosting SQL Server data, we recommend choosing a VM type that is either identical to, or slightly below the bandwidth values of the two Everpure Cloud Dedicated option controller types: