Availability Zones provide different datacenter with independent cooling, power and network within one Azure Region.
Every Azure Subscription gets three zones, it is important to understand that we mix the real datacenters with the assigned zones every time you create a new subscription.
To learn more about SAP and Availability Zones visit our documentation.
As Azure regions consist of multiple datacenters in an area the network latency between the different zones might differ.
To provide an easy way of testing you can use this script.
requirements:
- Azure Subscription
- Core quota assigned to the subscription incl zone deployment (we recommend to use D8s_v3 or bigger, so at least 24 cores required)
- possibility to connect to the VMs using SSH (Public IP addresses or existing VNET with private IP addresses)
- PowerShell 5.1 or newer
- PowerShell modules Posh-SSH and Az
The script creates three VMs, one in each zone and then runs qperf to test the latency and throughput. Depending on your parameters the environment will be deleted after your test or kept for further usage.
You can decide to use qperf or niping (SAP tool) to test the latency and bandwidth. If you want to use niping please provide a URL to e.g. a BLOB storage which provides direct access to the niping executable. The output for qperf and niping is the same.
In addition you will receive a list of Azure hypervisor hosts where your VM is running.
Getting Hosts for virtual machines
VM1 : AMS07XXXXXXXXXX
VM2 : AMZ07XXXXXXXXXX
VM3 : AMS21XXXXXXXXXX
Region: westeurope
VM Type: Standard_D8s_v3
Latency:
----------------------------------------------
| zone 1 | zone 2 | zone 3 |
-------------------------------------------------------
| zone 1 | | xx us | xx us |
| zone 2 | xx us | | xx us |
| zone 3 | xx us | xx us | |
-------------------------------------------------------
Bandwidth:
----------------------------------------------
| zone 1 | zone 2 | zone 3 |
-------------------------------------------------------
| zone 1 | | xxx MB/sec | xxx MB/sec |
| zone 2 | xxx MB/sec | | xxx MB/sec |
| zone 3 | xxx MB/sec | xxx MB/sec | |
-------------------------------------------------------
Based on the output you can decide which zones to use.