We're currently using a B4ms VM as a Windows server to host our AspNetCore applications, and everything is working smoothly. However, with our reserved instance about to expire, we're considering an upgrade since our applications have expanded. I found that the B4as offers better performance at a lower cost, especially relevant for us in India. While this sounds appealing, some team members are hesitant about switching to AMD CPUs due to potential issues they've heard of. We want to ensure our VM server is reliable, so any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated!
3 Answers
It's essential to run some tests based on your specific use case. Not all workloads are guaranteed to perform better on the new hardware—it can vary a lot based on what you're doing with the VMs.
Have you considered whether running your apps on a VM is really necessary? You might get more flexibility from using an app service plan or a few smaller plans instead. Also, is Windows a must for your server? Switching to Linux could save you money and improve performance, especially in the long run.
I haven't had any problems with the B4as v2 yet. I've set up domain controllers using the B4as and B2as v2 without issues. However, I did encounter some capacity challenges in West Europe, and for that, I switched to B2s v2 with Intel. Just a heads up: B series v2 doesn't have a temp disk, so you'll need to migrate your pagefile from the temp disk accordingly.
Thanks for the tip! Are your domain controllers .NET-based? How long have you been running these VMs? Also, could you share more details about the capacity issues and how to manage them?
VMs suit our application setup well. We rely on some Windows services, plus we're in active development, which makes it easier to stick with Windows for now. We've got plans to transition to Linux when things are more stable. For now, we're focused on the VM hardware.