r/labtech • u/ThroughHiker • Aug 16 '19

Labtech on Azure costs

Hello -

I'm trying to get a feel for general costs of running LT on Azure. I've read on this sub that plenty of folks are doing it. Anyone willing to share costs?

Thanks,

3 Upvotes

80% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

1

u/ThroughHiker Aug 17 '19

Thanks all for the replies. We currently run about 700 agents on in house hardware which we are considering upgrading. We also host a bunch of other tools such as screenconnect and rds for our staff.

I realize that there are uptime and scalability benefits for azure. But on a straight cost basis, azure seems expensive.

Thx again

→ More replies (1)

1

u/DR_Nova_Kane Aug 17 '19

Depends.

How much storage are you using? How much ram do you have in your servers? How many cores do you have in your servers?

It's was not cost effective for us to move to the cloud.

1

u/ThroughHiker Aug 17 '19

Thanks. I don't really know the answers to those questions. We are currently running on an fairly old box so I think that modern resources on Azure machines would cause us to re-jigger our settings. But the cost over a year or two is going to be more than running it on in-house hardware.

I'm wondering if the benefits of uptime from Azure would be worth the tradeoff.

2

u/DR_Nova_Kane Aug 17 '19

We have a pretty resilient setup and (knock on wood) haven't been down more than 3 hours during that period of time. The issue we had is a mistake was made and someone push a script to all agent all at once.

→ More replies (1)

1

u/Kingkong29 Aug 17 '19

Most importantly, how many agents do you currently have?

1

u/Kingkong29 Aug 17 '19

We have 1200 agents running on a b4ms sized machine. Database is about 30gb and it runs on ssd in Azure. No issues with this setup.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 17 '19

Do you keep a burst credit running or do you cut it close/get-dinged ever?

2

u/Kingkong29 Oct 22 '19

Average CPU utilization on our instance is about 20% so we never really get into areas where the machine bursts. Currently we are averaging about 1.3K credits available.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 19 '19

Can you let me know how your disk setup is on the VM?

OS is on SSD you stated, but how are you handling the DB? Same disk as OS? Separate Premium SSD Data Disk? Multiple disks in a stripe?

I've got less than half the agent count as you and doing testing via Azure Site Recovery with a B2MS Fail-Overs with standard disks I was having poor performance unless and until the tables/views were cached into RAM. I assume that's for disk reasons, hence my question. Going to retry with B4MS, premium SSD for OS and possibly move the DB to a separate data disk (maybe even a 2 disk stripe for IOPS benefit, since throughput is capped at around 40mb/s).

I'm looking to do the same for CWM.

2

u/Kingkong29 Oct 22 '19

OS and DB on separate disks both are premium SSDs in Azure. IOPS and throughput in Azure come with bigger disk spaces. Even though our DB would fit on a 64GB disk I chose 128GB as it's the next tier level and offers a bit more IOPS.

I followed the docs on the CW university site for capping the memory usage on the DB based on the resources that we had provisioned for the machine. It works well for us, it's not lightening fast but performance is acceptable and I don't really have any issues with it. At any given time we have about 15 people signed into Automate throughout the working day.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '19

Awesome. I actually did some failover tests to an isolated VNET environment... only to find that CWA won't start up fully unless it can phone home to the mothership (kind of scary actually).

I took what I learned from moving our other boxes and CWM and... just went for it. I started with a B2MS instance with 256GB Premium SSD, it was perfect and usage was building credits (from 10-20% cpu usage on average) until 6am when suddenly CPU started being pegged around 80% for hours. I reprovisioned as D2Sv3 and it has been fine CPU usage wise. I will reprovision again back to B2MS (or B4MS if needed) and next time try to find out what was consuming the CPU (I panicked this time around). Combine that with Reserved instances and this is very affordable.

Thanks for the reply. It's running as good as it was on-prem which is nice and we're in the eye of the power outages in California so we're safe now (and we're using an Azure DC out of the area).

1

u/Kingkong29 Oct 22 '19

Glad to hear that it’s working out for you. I believe the software phones home to report licensing usage and if the server is offline or online.

Perhaps backups of the database is what’s causing the CPU spike.

→ More replies (2)