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[Hilton]

Hi I'm just about to play around with MC in Azure. Has anyone tried this before?

I'm setting up a cloud server to just play around a bit using Windows 8.1 Enterprise in Azure.

[Hilton]

   Ok give me something harder to do!

MC21 works fine with an A1 machine (1 core and 1.75GB ram)
I just had to configure a firewall rule and connect with an access key from my home machine.
I uploaded a flac file and 720P mkv to the Azure machine and they both played back to my local HTPC machine from the server in Azure without any issues.

I ended up using a server 2012 R2 image as it was easier than stuffing up my MSDN subscription which is tied to my work accounts.
I sell cloud and Azure services for a living and it never occurred to me until today to try this.

It was too easy.... now what to do with it.  Azure storage is too expensive. (for home use)

[ferday]

Come on mate, you must get a nice discount

as always thanks for posting your experiments!

[Hilton]

Logged into the Azure Server
JRiver-Azure by Hilton, on Flickr

Azure Server Management Portal
Azure-JRiver-server by Hilton, on Flickr

The HTPC connected to the Azure Server Library playing back the video locally.
JRiver-playback-Azure by Hilton, on Flickr

[mwillems]

What's the JRMark of the VM?  I'm curious as on-the-fly transcoding is an important part of my use case.

[Hilton]

What's the JRMark of the VM?  I'm curious as on-the-fly transcoding is an important part of my use case.

Not great!

=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 21.737 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 11.336 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 43.606 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 22.435 seconds
Score: 192

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 1.679 seconds
    Flood filling... 1.700 seconds
    Direct copying... 3.947 seconds
    Small renders... 7.479 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 22.225 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 11.263 seconds
Score: 456

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.901 seconds
    Populate database... 5.223 seconds
    Save database... 1.433 seconds
    Reload database... 0.334 seconds
    Search database... 8.498 seconds
    Sort database... 4.240 seconds
    Group database... 2.505 seconds
Score: 929

JRMark (version 21.0.50): 526

[Hilton]

Here's the performance on an A3 2core 3.5GB Ram VM

=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 20.762 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 10.909 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 22.155 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 11.686 seconds
Score: 290

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 1.040 seconds
    Flood filling... 1.996 seconds
    Direct copying... 2.767 seconds
    Small renders... 6.927 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 11.051 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 5.887 seconds
Score: 742

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.833 seconds
    Populate database... 6.182 seconds
    Save database... 1.880 seconds
    Reload database... 1.129 seconds
    Search database... 8.263 seconds
    Sort database... 4.257 seconds
    Group database... 2.086 seconds
Score: 873

JRMark (version 21.0.50): 635

[Hilton]

And here's on a D12v2 4core Xeon E5 2673 with 28GB Ram and 200GB SSD

=== Running Benchmarks (please do not interrupt) ===

Running 'Math' benchmark...
    Single-threaded integer math... 5.604 seconds
    Single-threaded floating point math... 3.384 seconds
    Multi-threaded integer math... 3.071 seconds
    Multi-threaded mixed math... 1.760 seconds
Score: 1375

Running 'Image' benchmark...
    Image creation / destruction... 0.314 seconds
    Flood filling... 0.406 seconds
    Direct copying... 0.511 seconds
    Small renders... 1.492 seconds
    Bilinear rendering... 1.158 seconds
    Bicubic rendering... 0.594 seconds
Score: 4916

Running 'Database' benchmark...
    Create database... 0.212 seconds
    Populate database... 3.957 seconds
    Save database... 1.654 seconds
    Reload database... 0.484 seconds
    Search database... 2.300 seconds
    Sort database... 1.454 seconds
    Group database... 0.759 seconds
Score: 1987

JRMark (version 21.0.50): 2759

[mwillems]

Thanks for those Hilton. That confirms that this wouldn't be usable/competitive for my use case (even with the Xeon!).  I've often thought about migrating my self-hosted server out into a VPS or cloud service backend, but watching video on the android remotes involves mandatory on the fly transcoding, so I'd need fairly serious "grunt," and that doesn't really seem to be available and/or affordable out in the cloud.  My current solution works pretty well, but it never hurts to be curious