What Are the Limitations of a B-Series Azure VM?

Applies to: Nerdio for Azure (NFA) only. 

Background

The B-series (burstable) VMs are ideal for workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously, for example, web servers, small databases and development, and test environments. These workloads typically have performance requirements which come in bursts.

This is how it works: B-Series Azure instances provide these customers the ability to purchase a VM size with a price-conscious baseline performance that allows the VM instance to build up credits when the VM is utilizing less than its base performance. When the VM has accumulated credit, the VM can burst above its baseline using up to 100% of the CPU when your application requires a higher CPU performance.

Example use cases include development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small databases, micro-services, servers for proofs-of-concept, build servers and so on.

Limitations of B series Azure instances

• You cannot use the full CPU of B series machines unless you've built up "CPU credits". These credits build up when you stay under the baseline and max out over a 24 hour period.
• B series is great for low CPU processes, and customers normally use them to run scheduled tasks and domain controllers.
• B series instances don't support premium storage caching so there may be delays in read and write operations and, in turn, lead to poor disk performance. 

Note: NAP sends an email notification to the partner if B series credit for any of the servers falls beyond a certain threshold value:

The partner needs to enable "Server notifications" from Settings->Notifications page: