CS 031: Moving Application Server To Azure To Speed Up Application

Running applications within Azure or over an ExpressRoute connection. After a theme song, I'm going to talk all about it.

Hi, this is Marcel Martens of The Cloud Secrets Podcast. Welcome back. Today we're going to test... Well if you listen to a few podcasts ago, I was talking about the disk speed within WVD. It was a bit disappointing and we were trying to figure it out, why that was happening. We came to the conclusion that the bigger the disc you take, the more IOPS you get. So we expanded the disc to one terabyte and choose Premium SSD, and with that we got all the IOPS that we need. But the application was still starting... I don't know, it took like 40 to 50 seconds before we get the login screen of that particular application. And we did all kinds of network traces and used Wireshark to see what was going on.

But what we saw was that, in the end, it only the last two seconds of the startup phase, only in those two seconds the application was using network traffic to our data center. So from WVD within Azure to our own data center where all the application servers of this particular customer are hosted and... Well, that's a bit odd because when whatever application needs 40 seconds or 50 seconds to start, in my opinion, that's absurd, these days. I should get a login screen or whatever in a few seconds, maybe 10 seconds, but that's it. And when we take a look at the startup time within Citrix, the current solution the customer's using, there it takes like four seconds to pop up with the login screen. So we're trying to figure out what the difference is, and for that, we've run out of options because we did all these traces, and increased speed, and increased IOPS, and fine tuned everything there is to tune.

But the last thing is that maybe it's due to latency, and while we got a really slow latency... It's a couple of hundred kilometers to the Azure Western Europe location, and our latency from our data center to the actual WVD desktop is around seven to nine milliseconds. And of course within Citrix, between the application and the application server, the latency is less than one millisecond, of course, because they're running next to each other.

So last week we set up the Disaster Recovery Synchronization Tools. I don't know what you call them within Azure. And I believe my colleague yesterday finished up the migration, or the synchronization, of the current application server. And then today we're going to switch servers, so we're going to make the server on the Azure side their primary server, shut down the server within our data center, and then we can test what the application startup time is within WVD connecting to that Azure Application Server or VM.

And my guess is, or my hope actually, is that it starts up within four or five seconds as well because then we've got a business case and we can migrate all their application servers, or all their servers, all their VMs, towards Azure and start building the total WVD solution, including all their application servers.

So that's a rather technical one, again. And I'm going to follow up with this one. Maybe at the end of today or maybe on Monday, it's Friday by the way now, but by the time you hear this, it's going to take a few weeks because I create them in advance and I'm pretty curious... I really hope this fixes the startup time issues because otherwise the proof of concept of WVD in this particular case is a dead one, because it's not going to work. And they're not going to wait 40 seconds or 50 seconds for an application to start. And other applications as well.

Especially with their sales... Well, their ERP system. They use Ax, Dynamics of Microsoft. And well, when you hit an order form or enter an order and want to enter the next one, you've got a few seconds delay and that's not acceptable.

We're going to test with this application. If this run starts out fine, and then starts up within the excepted time frames, then we're going to make a business case to move all their applications toward Azure. And then we can finally migrate them from the Citrix Solutions to WVD.

So I'll keep you posted. Thanks for listening. And if you like this, by the way, please rate and subscribe. You do me a huge favor, not only for me, but also for all the IT professionals to be able to find this podcast because it's little known as at this time. So please share, like, rate, subscribe, do whatever you want with it. Shout about it, and I'll see you guys next time. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye. Marcel Martens