Microsoft Azure’s New GS-Series VMs, D-Series Price Cuts Are Good News for Dynamics AX Customers

Measuring throughput on a GS-series (Source) 

Microsoft has rolled out the new GS-series of Azure virtual machines, broadening its range of computing-intensive IaaS offerings for larger enterprises. Microsoft Dynamics AX customers looking for higher levels of performance and Premium Storage from Azure could benefit from the new VM, wrote Christian Pedersen, general manager for Microsoft Dynamics AX, in a blog post about the new VMs.

“The capabilities offered by the new GS-series give even more choice to our customers to deploy Dynamics AX on Microsoft Azure – capabilities such as supporting high volume transaction volumes [sic] to enable real-time inventory and BI capabilities that any global, world class enterprise requires to run their business critical applications,” according to Pedersen.

The GS series of VMs offers a level that could be more than many Dynamics AX customers will need, says Tim Harris, vice president of strategy and solutions at Arbela, a veteran AX partner.

“There will be scenarios under the lower end of the GS series – likely in the GS-2 or GS-3 range – which will support high transaction volumes in some AX scenarios for large distributers or high volume manufactures,” says Harris. He adds that many of the other uses for the GS-series machines will likely be in scenarios that involve next level disk throughput for heavy applications such as Internet of Things and Big Data scenarios, as well as other disk intensive scenarios.

Along with the new GS-series, Microsoft announced it is going to be dropping the prices on its D-series VMs starting October 1, 2015. Prices reductions will be up to 27%. Arbela’s Harris believes this price cut is going to more interesting than the new GS-series for the majority of AX customers since the D-series with SSD drives will often remain a better fit for their computing needs.

“The vast storage output (64TB) of the GS series will have limited applications at this point for most of our customers, but we will eventually run into the right application of this and it will be nice to have the capability,” he says.

Earlier this year, when Microsoft rolled out its Azure D-Series virtual machines and Azure Premium Storage, it enabled more customers to deploy production instances for Dynamics AX directly on Azure using Lifecycle Services (LCS). That gave customers “clear, predictable, repeatable implementation capabilities” and also significantly cut their deployment times, Pedersen said.

Last week, Microsoft announced other efforts it is making to give administrators better control over their Azure resource consumption They announced the availability of new tools and scripts that leverage Azure Automation through Runbooks capabilities to manage their environments efficiently in Azure leveraging LCS. Microsoft expects these scripts will help customers and partners that are doing dev/test on Azure cut their monthly costs by up to 69% or.

To date there have been more than 15,000 Dynamics AX cloud VM deployments in Azure – a number that increases daily, Pedersen said.