Azure Premium SSD v1 vs v2
Microsoft has made the newest release of its Azure Premium variety of solid-state drive (SSD) cloud storage available for the public. The company announced the release of the latest Azure Premium SSD v2 storage at its Ignite event, following an invite-only preview launch in May 2022. The new variety of high-capacity drives for businesses is designed to offer the lowest latency for “performance-critical workloads”, while additionally allowing for storage growth of up to 64 terabytes (TiB).
Azure Premium v2 disks uncouple IOPs and throughput metrics from disk size, which means you could alter the IOPS, throughput, and capacity in keeping with your workload needs. Premium SSD v2 disks are designed to deal with performance-sensitive and general-purpose workloads that require low average read and write latency, high IOPS, and high throughput. Whereas with Azure Premium and Azure Ultra disks, IOPS and throughput are fixed by means of disk size. This could make Premium SSD V2 disks an efficient and cost-effective alternative for running and scaling transaction-intensive workloads.
Premium SSD v2 overview
The capabilities of v2 are as follows:
Ability to increase disk storage ability in 1 GiB increments.
Originally, v1 was supplied in 14 fixed disk capacities, from P1 to P80. In contrast, v2 lets you specify capacity in GiB, this allows efficient provisioning.
For instance, if you desired 200GB of ability, P10 (128GB) would not have enough potential with v1, so you might need to choose a P15 (256GB) disk. 56GB might be provisioned unnecessarily and cost money. With v2, you may be able to provision precisely the 200GB you need.
The ability to provision IOPS, throughput, and disk storage capacity separately.
In v1, performance was determined according to the disk size (P1 to P80), and if you wanted "small size but high overall performance!", you needed to use an unnecessarily big disk. In v2, it is largely possible to specify disk size and performance one at a time (even though there are some overall performances that cannot be performed without a minimum disk size).
Consistent sub-millisecond latency.
"Sub-milliseconds" has long been the marketing slogan for Ultra Disk. It is possible that v2 is quicker than v1. It is crucial to consider this point.
Easier preservation with scaling overall performance up and down without downtime.
In v2, evidently, you can change overall performance even while staying online. In v1, it only became possible to amplify capability (together with performance improvement) online a while ago, however, as written above, capacity and performance are a set, so you only need to change performance in the first place.
Up to 64 TiBs, 80,000 IOPS, and 1200 MB/s on a single disk.
The higher limit of specifications has been increased. In addition, v1 is the specification when the burst is protected, and v2 is the specification when provisioning to maximum performance.
If you need specs that can't be covered by one disk, you will want to make a few ingenuity or restrictions, which include using LVM in Linux, so a higher upper restriction for specifications is welcome.
Comparison with Premium SSD v1
Now that we understand the specs and differences in capabilities, let's observe a more exact comparison, which also includes the way to use v1 and v2.
Performance comparison
v1 has a feature known as "burst" that lets you temporarily release overall performance. Therefore, the concept behind v1 is to keep the base performance low and make amends for temporary demands with bursts.
On the other hand, v2 is based totally on the concept that even small disks have high base overall performance, but performance does not increase despite the fact that the disk size is expanded. In order to increase performance, additional IOPS and throughput have to be provisioned, which incurs expenses.
With v2, the overall performance stays consistent even if you change the disk size, and with v1, IOPS increases in line with the disk size. However, the overall IOPS performance of v2 is overwhelming, and if you are looking for even better overall performance, v2 is the only choice. (Note that v2 also requires a certain quantity of disk space to achieve maximum performance.)
There is not an awful lot of difference between the burst overall performance of v1 and the base performance of v2. Especially for small-sized disks, the overall performance relationship is v2 base < v1 burst < v2 maximum, so the requirements for the usage of v1 are likely to be pretty limited.
Price comparison is based totally on base overall performance, and rate comparison is primarily based on the burst equivalent of v1.
If you don't require high overall performance from the disk and want a simple disk size, do a simple price assessment.
It is clear that v2 has a lower rate per unit capacity. Also, considering v1 is a format where you choose the size from a menu, it's very discrete. A massive difference is that v2 is a format that allows you to specify the scale in GiB, so it seems endless. In the case of v1, for instance, even if "513GiB" is required, it's very important to provision "1024GiB" of P30 storage, resulting in many patterns of waste. Therefore, if you are not looking for performance, it's safe to say that choosing v2 is the best choice.
Price contrast for v1 base equivalent and burst equivalent
Furthermore, let's examine if you can get the same performance as v1 with v2, which includes burst. Since v1's burst function has time constraints and costs money for burst IO, it isn't possible to make an easy evaluation.
This time, we are able to count on the possibility that processing that might be done in v1 consisting of bursts can also be accomplished in v2, and count on that the same performance as burst performance will be provisioned in v2 (conservative estimate).
When provisioned to the base performance of v1, v2 is essentially a better value. If you provision the burst performance equal to v1, v1 will be more profitable while the disk size is small.
V1's "Credit Burst" is a function that permits you to carry out disk bursts for a short time (within half an hour) free of charge, so in case you are using v1, only if it fits flawlessly with the menu system (size) of v1 and you're making proper use of disk bursts. It can be said that it is a good deal.
When to use it
So the policy is as follows:
Requirements suitable for v1
- It is small (1024 GiB or much less) and is the proper size.
- The base overall performance of v2 is not sufficient.
- It suits the burst performance of v1, and there are instances where the processing can be included in the burstable time of v1.
And there are very rare instances. However, there may be instances wherein v1 is more appropriate (if the same performance can be accomplished at a lower rate).
Requirements suitable for v2
- When you only want size without requiring performance, or
- When the required overall performance is high in the first place and cannot be met with v1,
Everything else will rely on a case-by-case basis; however, basically, v2 appears to be the winner in terms of being capable of offering the specified size, IOPS, and throughput as wished. The cases where v1 is needed are very constrained.
Essential points
Finally, let's check the current limitations of v2.
- Premium SSD v2 disks cannot be used as OS disks.
- Currently, Premium SSD v2 disks can only be connected to zone VMs.
- Creating snapshots is not supported at the moment. Additionally, you cannot create a Premium SSD v2 from a snapshot of any other disk type.
- Currently, Premium SSD v2 disks cannot be attached to VMs that have encryption at the host enabled.
- Azure Disk Encryption isn't supported on VMs with Premium SSD v2 disks.
- Currently, Premium SSD v2 disks can't be connected to VMs in availability sets.
- Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery are not supported on VMs with Premium SSD v2 disks.
There are many difficult situations for real operation in a production environment, which include not being able to use ADE, not being capable of using Azure Backup, and not assisting snapshots.
Also, the supported regions are currently the Eastern US and Western Europe.
Conclusion
Current Premium SSD Disk configurations are fixed in their size, IOPs, and throughput ratios and therefore require extra overhead and creativity to reap particular workloads for high-appearing systems and typically include wasted resources that you are buying.
With the advent of Premium SSD V2 disks, you could have better control over your configuration and therefore only pay for what you need. Reductions in operating costs and control overhead are something that benefits all users and ought to be something to be watched for in your Azure deployment region.
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