Azure Virtual Machines Reviews & Product Details

Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are scalable, on-demand computing resources provided by Microsoft Azure, enabling users to deploy and manage virtualized Windows and Linux servers in the cloud. These VMs support a wide range of workloads, from simple web applications to complex enterprise solutions, offering flexibility and control over computing resources without the need for physical hardware maintenance. Key Features and Functionality: - Diverse VM Series: Azure offers various VM series tailored to specific needs: - General Purpose (D-series, B-series): Balanced CPU-to-memory ratio, suitable for web servers and small to medium databases. - Compute Optimized (F-series): High CPU-to-memory ratio, ideal for CPU-intensive tasks like batch processing. - Memory Optimized (E-series): High memory-to-CPU ratio, designed for in-memory applications and large databases. - Storage Optimized (L-series): High disk throughput and IOPS, perfect for big data and data warehousing. - GPU-enabled (N-series): Equipped with GPUs for graphics-intensive and machine learning workloads. - Operating System Support: Azure VMs support a broad range of operating systems, including various distributions of Linux and all supported versions of Windows Server. - Scalability and Availability: Features like Virtual Machine Scale Sets allow for automatic scaling of applications, and Availability Sets ensure high availability by distributing VMs across multiple physical servers. - Integrated Security: Built-in security features include Azure Security Center for threat detection and response, and compliance with various industry standards. - Cost Management: Options like Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances and Azure Hybrid Benefit help optimize costs, while Azure Spot Virtual Machines offer significant discounts for interruptible workloads. Primary Value and Solutions Provided: Azure Virtual Machines offer businesses the ability to quickly deploy and manage scalable computing resources without the overhead of maintaining physical hardware. This flexibility allows organizations to respond rapidly to changing demands, optimize costs through various pricing options, and ensure high availability and security for their applications. By leveraging Azure VMs, users can focus on developing and running their applications while Azure handles the underlying infrastructure, leading to increased operational efficiency and agility.

Seller

Microsoft

Discussions

Azure Virtual Machines Community

Solution Type

Best-of-Breed

Overview by

shiv kumar

Value at a Glance

Averages based on real user reviews.

Time to Implement

3 months

Return on Investment

15 months

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Top-Rated Alternatives

Google Compute Engine

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User Insights

Average based on 393 real user reviews.

Implementation Time

3 months

Perceived Cost

$$$$$

Azure Virtual Machines Integrations

(6)

Integration information sourced from real user reviews.

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Verified User in Insurance

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

10/4/2018

"Great competitor to AWS"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

Flexibility and compatibility with the products we use for Insurance industry. Integration is easier and deployment is easy too. Scaling is same as available on other products. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

A bit on the costly side compared to AWS. Also, the amount of third-party content is less compared to AWS. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Internet

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

9/27/2018

"Azure Virtual Machines"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

I like that they are like physical computers. They are almost the same. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

I had an issue connecting it to internet. I had to search in internet and dowload some dll. It finally worked but I lost a lot of time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Accounting

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

9/26/2018

"Azure Review"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

It has an easy user interface and is very self-explanatory if you run into any issues. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

the price seems a little steep for what is is Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Azure Virtual Machines:

It's an easy user interface and will be quick to implement in regards to training purposes Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Azure Virtual Machines solving and how is that benefiting you?

we're able to scale our projects that are bigger in size a lot faster and to more capability with azure Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Maxim O.

Programmer

Computer Networking

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

12/13/2017

"Good clowd solution"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

Fast and good deployment of virtual machines. Very rapidly growth of new services, that can deploy to my infrastructure in one-two clicks. Also I can easy duplicate infrastractures and change some settings for testing or backups. Also clearly to understand to what I spend money using automatic generate xls-spreadsheet. Also some times ago new administrate interface appears with many new features of easy Azure cloud administrate. There are some calculators of spending resources, and I can predict spending money in the future. There is nearly static ip-address for resolving name of machine, it was very useful in my projects. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

Sometimes it is not easy to understand, where tunings. For example, how change cores of virtual machine. Or how to change root or admin password. Some actions only can be done with console (putty or windows console). Also if I want to deep analysis my spendings, then I must do my own filters in the Excel, there are no default filters or smart deep views of spending money. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Azure Virtual Machines:

Firstly test all opportunites of services, and get experience in "what I can do now and what tunings works well". And then use XLS spreadsheet to calculate spending of money of your services. It can be downloaded directly from Azure. Then do intelligent decisions - what useful for that amount of money. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Azure Virtual Machines solving and how is that benefiting you?

Testing several sites and services. Use cloud database and cloud file datastores for accessing files from any location. For example, we tune VPN tunnels in the fast linux infrastracture. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Computer Software

Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.)

6/26/2018

"Easily to install and use Virtual Machines"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

Many OS we can choose to use from Windows OS to Linux Distributions. Also we can scale up the VMs easily and just a short time. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

There are some changes still need to restart VMs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Accounting

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

10/4/2018

"Positive Experience!"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

The best part about Azure Virtual Machines is that it is easy to use Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

Sometimes it takes awhile to load certain features Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Accounting

Enterprise (> 1000 emp.)

9/27/2018

"Azure increased business agility"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

Speed of deployment and ability to scale wuickly Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

Need to have people with specific platform expertise Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Verified User in Higher Education

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

8/7/2017

"Microsoft Azure in the Cloud"

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

The ability to manage virtual servers in the cloud is the best part for us. We can also replicated our critical services there to have on stand by in case we have a critical outage on site. It is nice to know we have those for fail over purposes. If we were to have a disaster such as a long term outage or our data center gets taken out by a storm or other disaster, we can be back up and running quickly on their off site cloud infrastructure. We can also keep things synced with our software we use to make sure the Azure virtual server are up to date to a reasonable point in time so as not to have a significant difference in our data on our on site servers. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

It is a bit confusing to navigate until you figure out where things are located. And since we are a vmware shop, we have to do some learning about Hyper-V although as I understand it, they have a solution where they can manage it at Microsoft with little interaction on the customers side, Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Azure Virtual Machines:

Sign up for the 30-day free trial. Watch some online videos to learn and read some how to documents. We followed along with the videos and tested those things in the trial version. YouTube has a lot of good tutorials as does other sites. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Azure Virtual Machines solving and how is that benefiting you?

Disaster Recovery via replicating our servers to the cloud. Sync of Active Directory. Dir Sync to sync user accounts over to Office 365. Allowing our Office 365 users to have a self service self password reset solution. We operate a mixed environment. Exchange in house for employees and Office 365 for our students as we are a university user. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Roman U.

Internal Technical Project Manager

Human Resources

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

1/26/2018

"Good cloud platform service. Worth it for the functionality, not so sure about price."

4/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

Few clicks and servers are ready in a few minutes. Cost effective, don't have to manage monitoring as you will get the alert as per your requirements.Never have any performance issues, boosts the performance as per your needs Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

The on-premise backup and restoration. Disk encryption for critical apps/data. Cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Azure Virtual Machines:

Manual setup is tedious but once spun up, environments are stable.

Tip: Once you've finished manually setting up the environment, document the process and script the environment. You'll be happy you did. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Azure Virtual Machines solving and how is that benefiting you?

Our organization is working on a hybrid solution to allow us to remove in-office, legacy hardware and software solutions, out of our office. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Jonathan G.

System Architect

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

7/26/2017

"Good cloud platform, but still Microsoft"

3.5/5

What do you like best about Azure Virtual Machines?

It seemed easy enough to spin up some virtual machines Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What do you dislike about Azure Virtual Machines?

However, there's a steep learning curve where you need to learn Resource Groups etc. Also, there are a lot of dependencies and not any product is necessarily complete by itself Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Recommendations to others considering Azure Virtual Machines:

Of the cloud platforms out there I would recommend AWS first, then Google, then maybe Rackspace, and last maybe Microsoft - but only if you're already married to Microsoft and you can't get out . ; ) Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

What problems is Azure Virtual Machines solving and how is that benefiting you?

We are using Azure to spread out our infrastructure for security purposes - not all of our eggs in one basket if you will. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.