All You Need To Know About Microsoft Cloud PCs Performance

Microsoft offers its cloud PCs, in which the entire computer runs in an Azure instance, in different configurations at different prices, but says nothing about performance. The company has now explained why this is so.

According to Ron Martinsen, who heads the product management for the Windows 365 Cloud PC, we are simply not dealing with individual systems here. Rather, several cloud PCs usually run on a cluster in the Azure data center. And these then each used nested virtualization, for example, to run the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) or the Windows Subsystem for Android (WSA).

This alone makes it almost impossible to repeat tests with identical environments to guarantee accurate performance numbers. In addition, Microsoft is constantly updating its infrastructure, so it can happen that the entire instance is moved overnight to a cluster with the latest hardware and receives correspondingly more performance. That would also change measurement data directly.

Continuous changes

That’s also why Windows 365 doesn’t offer customers a choice of specific hardware, instead opting for tiers like 2 vCPU/8GB RAM/128GB storage and 8 vCPU/32GB RAM/128GB storage. The goal is to meet service level agreements (SLAs) for customers while maintaining a predictable monthly price, Martinsen explained.

Even if there are no absolute benchmark values, that doesn’t mean that customers are completely left to their own devices. Microsoft provides an overview of relative performance metrics for different cloud PC configurations. Here, users can at least orientate themselves between the individual classes. After all, a certain degree of reliability is necessary, otherwise, you would receive unmanageable support requests, especially from business customers. In addition, it would also tend to harm the goal of making the cloud PC an integral part of the Windows strategy.