New Azure Feature Aims to Minimize VM Network Latency

• Azure Proximity Placement Groups, in preview, help minimize network latency between VMs.
• The feature can improve performance of Azure solutions that use multiple VMs, such as those with tiered designs.
• The feature has limitations that require planning, and it cannot be applied to existing deployments.

Azure Proximity Placement Groups (PPGs) allow customers to force Azure VMs to be provisioned in the same regional data center (so-called, co-locating), minimizing the physical distance and networking bottlenecks between them. Other Azure VM grouping features, such as Availability Sets, offer performance and fault tolerance benefits, but they do not target network latency.

Proximity Placement Groups Co-locate VMs

Provisioning VMs in the same data center can significantly reduce their communication latency compared to provisioning them in different data centers. This can benefit solutions deployed on Azure that use multiple VMs. For example, applications on Azure (such as certain SAP-based solutions) often have multiple VM tiers that are dedicated to user interface presentation, business logic, and data. Locating the VMs within close proximity reduces bottlenecks traversed on a network path, such as switches, and can be critical to performance of such solutions.