Storage Account performance and pricing for Azure Virtual Desktop

Choosing the right performance tier of Azure Storage Accounts can be very complex. How much size and performance do we need? How many users will login to Azure Virtual Desktop and how many profile size do we want to assign them?

In this blog post I will explain everything about hosting your FSLogix profiles on Azure Virtual Desktop and the storage account performance including pricing. AFter that we will do some real world performance testing and a conclusion.

Table of Contents

• Billing types for Storage Accounts
• Provisioned billing (V1 and V2)
• Pay-as-you-go billing
• Storage Account Performance Indicators
• Standard VS Premium performance and pricing example
• Testing performance in practice and conclusion
• Summary
  • Sources

Billing types for Storage Accounts

Before looking into the details, we first want to decide which billing type we want to use for our Storage Account. There are two billing types for storage accounts:

• Provisioned: Fixed storage size and fixed performance based on provisioning capacity
• Pay as you go: Pay only the storage what you need

You select this billing type at the storage account wizard. After creating the storage account, you can’t change the type. If you want to use premium storage account, then “provisioned” is required.

As you can see in this animation. For standard (HDD based) you can choose both, and for premium (SSD based) we have to provision storage.

Provisioned billing (V1 and V2)

When you want to be billed based on how many storage you provision/reserve, you can choose “provisioned”. This also means that we don’t pay for the transactions and egress costs as we pay a full package for the storage and can use it as much as we want.

We have two types of “provisioned” billing, V1 and V2:

The big difference between those two values is that in V1, you are stuck with Microsoft’s chosen performance based on how much you provision and with V2, you can change those values independently, as shown in the pictures below:

This way you can get more performance, with a little increase of credits instead of having to provision way more than you use.

Pay-as-you-go billing

Pay-as-you-go is the more linear manner of paying your storage account. Here you pay exactly what you use, and get a fixed performance but we have to pay additionally for transactions and egress of the data.

Because this billing option aligns tohow you use the storage, we can define for what purpose we use the storage account. This changes the prices of transactions, storage at rest and egress data. We have 3 categories/tiers:

• Transaction optimized
• Hot
• Cool

For Azure Virtual Desktop operating in standard performance and pay-as-you-go billing, Transaction optimized or Hot tiers are recommended. Let’s find out why:

Tier	Storage $/GB	IOPS Cost	Egress Cost	Use Cases
Transaction Optimized	Medium	Lowest	Normal	High metadata activity
Hot	Higher	Moderate	Lower	Frequent access
Cool	Lowest	Highest	Higher	Rare access, archival

Per this table, we would pay the most if we place frequent accessed files on a “Cool” tier, as you pay the most for IOPS. Therefore, for FSLogix profiles it the best to use “Hot” tier as we pay the most for storage and we try to limit that as much as possible by deleting unneeded profiles and limiting the profile size with FSLogix settings.

Storage Account Performance Indicators

Now we have those terms to indicate the performance, but what do they mean exactly?

• Maximum IO/s (IOPS): Maximum read/write operations/actions per second under normal conditions
• Burst IO/s (IOPS): Maximum temporary higher read/write operations/actions per second, but only for a short time (boost)
• Throughput rate: The maximum data transfer rate in MB/s that the storage account allows

Standard VS Premium performance and pricing example

Let’s say, we need a storage account. We want to know for 3 scenario’s which of the options would give us specific performance and also the costs of this configuration. We want the highest performance for the lowest price, or we want a upgrade for a little increase.

I want to go through all of the options to see the actual performance and pricing of 3 AVD profiles scenarios where we state we use 3 hypothetical sizes:

• 500GB (0,5TB) -> 20 users*
• 2500GB (2,5TB) -> 100 users*
• 5000GB (5TB) -> 200 users*
  • *25GB per user profile

I first selected “Provisioned” with premium storage with default IOPS/throughput combination. For the three scenarios I get by default: (click image to enlarge)

I put those numbers in the calculator, and this will cost as stated below (without extra options):

	IOPS	Burst IOPS	Throughput (MB/s)	Costs per month	Latency (in ms)
(Premium) 500GB	3500	10000	150	$ 96	1-5
(Premium) 2500GB	5500	10000	350	$ 480	1-5
(Premium) 5000GB	8000	15000	600	$ 960	1-5

You see, this is pretty much linear in terms of pricing. 96 dollars for every 500GB. Now let’s check the standard provisioned options:

	IOPS	Burst IOPS	Throughput (MB/s)	Costs per month	Latency (in ms)
(Standard) 500GB	1100	Not available	70	$ 68	10-30
(Standard) 2500GB	1500	Not available	110	$ 111	10-30
(Standard) 5000GB	2000	Not available	160	$ 165	10-30

This shows pretty clear as the storage size increases, we could trade in performance for monthly costs. However, FSLogix profiles are heavily dependent on latency which increases by alot when using standard tier.

Because the difference of 1-5 and 10-30 ms latency, Premium would be a lot faster with loading and writing changes to the profile. And we have the possibility of bursting for temporary extra speed.

Testing performance in practice and conclusion

To further clarify what those numbers mean in terms of performance, I have a practice test;

In this test we will place a 10GB (10.240 MB) file from a workstation to the Azure Storage to count the time and the average throughput (speed in MB per second).

Now let’s take a look at the results:

Left: Premium Right: Standard

The premium fileshare has finished this task 244% faster than the standard fileshare.

I also tested the profile mounting speed but they were around even. I have tested this with this script: https://justinverstijnen.nl/monitor-azure-virtual-deskop-logon-performance/

I couldn’t find a good way to test the performance when logged in and using the profile, but some tasks were clearly slower on the “standard” fileshare, like placing files on the desktop and documents folder.

Because FSLogix profiles heavily rely on low latency due to constant profile changes, we must have as low latency as possible which we also get with premium fileshares. I cannot state other than we must have Premium fileshares in production, at least for Azure Virtual Desktop and FSLogix disks.

Summary

This guide further clarifies the difference in costs and practice of Premium vs Standard Azure Storage Accounts for Azure Virtual Desktop. Due to the throughput and latency differences, for FSLogix profiles I would highly recommend using premium fileshares.

I hope this guide was very helpful and thank you for reading.

Sources

These sources helped me by writing and research for this post;

1. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/
2. https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/files/
3. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/understanding-billing
4. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/understand-performance?#glossary
5. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/blobs/storage-performance-checklist
6. https://justinverstijnen.nl/monitor-azure-virtual-deskop-logon-performance/
7. https://testfiles.ah-apps.de/

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