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We have 2 Ubuntu VMs inside Virtual Machine Flexible Orchestration that are behind Application Gateway and are running Apache Tomcat web servers. When a client connects to one of the VMs and uploads the files that files also need to exist on another Virtual Machine. I only found 2 options to do that:

  1. Azure File Share - $80/month for 1 TB of Hot SKU, but the speed is only 1 MBs when mounted as SMB share on Ubuntu.
  2. Azure NetApp Files - $600/month for 4 TB minimum.

Both of the options are not good, the first one is to slow and the second one is too expensive. What can we use in the development environment and production environment to achieve file sharing between Highly Available VMs?

Max
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2 Answers2

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1MBs is awfully low, I am not sure where this is coming from. I am fairly sure I get about 30MBs for Standard SSD/HDD deployments when mounting them into Linux docker containers, which should not perform worse.

An alternative to the mounted file shares would be to use shared disks. You can basically attach a disk to multiple VMs at the same time.

There are some limitations, for your case mainly mainly:

Shared disks can be attached to individual VMSS instances but can't be defined in the VMSS models or automatically deployed.

You can still expect to pay 50-200$ for the disk, but you should be able to get much better speeds than what you are currently getting.

shared disks example

Alex AIT
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  • Don't Shared Disks require significant management overhead of setting up cluster manager? From the documentation article that you linked: "Shared managed disks don't natively offer a fully managed file system that can be accessed using SMB/NFS. You need to use a cluster manager, like Windows Server Failover Cluster (WSFC), or Pacemaker, that handles cluster node communication and write locking.". – WinBoss Oct 05 '22 at 14:35
  • @WinBoss that is a valid point. I don't have practical experience with shared disks. My recommendation would be to explore the file share option in more detail. – Alex AIT Oct 05 '22 at 18:27
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Use a Blob and grant access via Managed Identity to your Virtual Machines:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/managed-identities-azure-resources/tutorial-vm-windows-access-storage

Blob Pricing and IOPS: https://azure.microsoft.com/es-es/pricing/details/storage/page-blobs/

Juanma Feliu
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  • While this approach would work, it would require changing application code which might take a significant amount of effort. – Max Oct 19 '22 at 08:46