Virtual machine (VM)-level disk bursting
Published date: 13 May, 2020
Virtual machine-level disk bursting is a new feature that allows your virtual machine to burst its disk IO and MiB/s throughput performance for a short time daily to handle unforeseen spikey disk traffic smoothly and process batched jobs with speed. The feature is now enabled on all Azure Lsv2-series virtual machines, with support for more virtual machine types and families to come soon. This feature doesn’t cost anything extra and comes enabled by default.
We also offer bursting on our Premium SSD Disks, as well on sizes P20 (512 GB) and smaller. Our bursting products are best used together for a single solution. This way, you can achieve great baseline performance and bursting performance without the need to overprovision your virtual machine or disk for the max performance.
Some example scenarios where bursting can be effective include:
- Handling batch jobs. Some application’s workloads are cyclical in nature, requiring a baseline performance for most of the time and a higher performance for a short period of time. For example, an accounting program that process transactions daily that require a small amount of disk traffic, but then reconciles month end reports, requiring a higher amount of disk traffic.
- Preparedness for traffic spikes. Web servers and their applications can get a surge of traffic from unforeseen circumstances. With bursting virtual machines and disks backing the web servers, the web servers will handle traffic spikes smoothly and improve their customer experience by reducing load times under heavy stress.
- Cost efficiency. Now you can deploy your virtual machines for their average use case instead of for peak performance. As long as the new bursting limits cover the peak performance needs and the peak is needed for less than 30 minutes a day, you no longer need to overprovision your virtual machine to meet your workload needs, helping to save you money.