This guide documents the results of a series of performance tests on Azure to see how scalable Lustre, GlusterFS, and BeeGFS are. Using a default configuration, the Azure Customer Advisory Team (AzureCAT) discovered how critical performance tuning is when designing Parallel Virtual File Systems (PVFSs) on Azure. Use these results as a baseline and guide for sizing the servers and storage configuration you need to meet your I/O performance requirements.
Updated March 2020 with information about using Lv2-series Azure virtual machines that feature NVMe disks. If an ephemeral file system is an option for you, this configuration works with Lustre to provide a cost-effective PVFS.