Not sure if anyone is using Azure for their enterprise servers or file-sharing. Just want to quickly share that we’ve had a great experience with it so far. We are a small liberal arts college and it suits our needs perfectly. Downtime is almost non-existent, no lag, cost is much less expensive than expected. Just want to pass that along if anyone is trying to decide whether they should make the move to Azure. I highly recommend it.
What Azure services are you using? We’re big fans of their federated authentication stack.
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We’re using Azure Files for departmental file/folder sharing and I’ve migrated 20 of our servers from onprem to Azure so we are just mainly using Azure for storage and virtual servers. Really loving it so far. Love the ease of management.
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Disclaimer: I work for a VAR and we resell Azure and migration services.
We migrated our own internal stuff over to Azure (minus the handful of things that need to stay “on-premise”) and its been working great. Once Azure files added support for traditional AD authentication, migrating our file shares there was a no-brainer. This has allowed us to reduce our on-premise footprint from 6 Hyper-V hosts to 2 hyperconverged systems.
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Nice! Sounds like you are happy with Azure as well. Our onprem HyperV SAN was aging and rather than purchase and setup a new onprem HyperV SAN, we just skipped that and went directly to the cloud via Azure. Was concerned about some things like lag, cost with print servers, etc. but it’s been great. I just try to keep the resources for each server as low as possible which keeps our costs down. Very happy so far!
What kind of connectivity and bandwidth do you have to Azure, and have you noticed any issues with latency since moving applications from on-premise?
Our resources are in US East. We have a 50MB connection (synchronous from Cable company via fiber) and a 100MB (synchronous from a local wireless provider) that use BGP. Rather than use the Azure VPN Gateway, we put in an actual firewall in Azure have a VPN setup between the two firewalls. I connect from my home via VPN to Azure. My lag to on-premise resources via that method is about 40-50ms. I think from on-prem to Azure is <20ms.
We specifically chose to keep certain resources on-premise. Domain Controllers (also in Azure), print servers, DHCP, MFA (though looking to migrate to a cloud service), NPS server (we run 802.1x on our client switches), and a CA (for the NPS server). With our main file server now being Azure files, we have found no issues with latency from our on-prem devices. Heck, performance is actually better than our old file server. The bulk of our users utilize Citrix servers in Azure for their apps. But even then, outside of our finance users, all of our apps are cloud based, so it doesn’t really matter where they are.
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