Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 CU8 reports performance in azure environment

apap

Hi everyone,
we are experiencing a performance problem when running reports from a Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 CU8 in azure. The same reports for the same servers on premises with the same architecture on premises they are running much quicker.
So the architecture is the following in the azure (the azure has a different domain from on premises but they are trusted between them):
-Two virtual machine boxes with 2 * 2 nav server instances. The requests from the clients are transmitted through a load balancer
-Two sql nodes in high availability group with a listener in front.The same architecture exists on premises. We have restored a prod backup to the sql server on azure. The azure machines are bigger after our initial tests We are experiencing a very strange issue, the reports all of them (default and ch customised ones) are running much much slower.
We have checked the firewalls, antivirus etc, and we have tried all possible configuration (even getting rid the application load balancer and the high availability group in sql server) and pointing one nav server instance to one single sql node, again the reports are very slow.
We have run out of things to try, so can i ask for the community's help? And also does anybody know if the report viewer 2012 for this NAV 2013 R2 CU8 in azure has being reported with performance problems
Kind regards

Juhl

All my testing on Azure VMs came to the same conclusion. It's slow.
Azures problem is hard drive speed, and this is bad for SQL.
Bench on single Azure drive is around 70mbs, the same as a old pata hard drive. In my hosted VMs it's between 2000-3000mbs.

I don't have NAV customers in Azure, but found a provider with Allflash storage, at the same price.

apap

Thanks a lot @Juhl for answering and pointing at this cause of the slow performance. Is there any explanation for the hard drive azure issues? Do you think that turning all hard disk for both application servers and sql servers to ssd will do things much faster?
Thanks again for the answer

Juhl

I tested Ssd as well, but it's sad.

I think it's related to drives being blobs over the network, but there are many blog, posts and chatter about this, just goggle and read.
Some design arrays with 16 discs just to get by.

apap

Thanks Juhl for answering, just an update: the results after we run performance tests when we installed NAV server in one of the SQL boxes in azure were the best (beating on-premises environment and multi-machine deployment on the azure even trying oneclick deployment of windows client throught internet). Of course with this architecture we cannot have high availability etc., so we have to solve the initial problem and use load balancing and sql availability group. Microsoft says that this architecture with NAV server and sql server on seperate boxes for 2013 R2 it's fine. Regards