Developer VM performance for MSDyn365FO

When you are used to snappy desktops or locally hosted virtual machines and suddenly you need to move to the cloud, you would expect to see similar capabilities for a reasonable price. Unfortunately that was not my experience when it comes to deploying AX 8.1 in Azure cloud. This post is about setting expectations straight for MSDyn365FO developer VM performance hosted in the cloud vs. locally.

First of all, when you deploy your developer VM on the cloud, you have two options. Standard and Premium, which is a reference to what kind of storage will be allocated to your machine. The default size is D13 (8 cores, 56 GB RAM) for regular rotating hard disks, and you need to use the DS-prefixed computers for the flash storage with memory-optimized compute. You can read up about them on these pages in more detail on the Microsoft Docs site:

Premium disk tiers
Virtual machine sizing

When it comes to premium performance, the Virtual Machine template that Microsoft has built for the LifeCycle Services deployment is using the following structure:

PurposeTierIOPSThroughput
Operating SystemP1050025 MB/sec (50K reads)
Services and DataP202300150 MB/sec (64K reads)
Temporary BuildP1050025 MB/sec (50K reads)

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