title: Azure VM pricing - Is it better to have 80 single core machines or 10 8-core machines?
body: <p>I am limited by a piece of software that utilizes a single core per instance of the program run. It will run off an SQL server work queue and deposit results to the server. So the more instances I have running the faster the overall project is done. I have played with Azure VMs a bit and can speed up the process in two ways.</p>
  
  <p>1) I can run the app on a single core VM, clone that VM and run it on as many as I feel necessary to speed up the job sufficiently.</p>
  
  <p>OR</p>
  
  <p>2) I can run the app 8 times on an 8-core VM, ...again clone that VM and run it on as many as I feel necessary to speed up the job sufficiently.</p>
  
  <p>I have noticed in testing that the speed-up is roughly the same for adding 8 single core VMs and 1 8-core VM. Assuming this is true, would it better better price-wise to have single core machines? </p>
  
  <p>The pricing is a bit of a mystery, whether it is real cpu usage time, or what. It is a bit easier using the 1 8-core approach as spinning up machines and taking them down takes time, but I guess that could be automated.</p>
  
  <p>It does seem from some pricing pages that the multiple single core VM approach would cost less?</p>
  
  <p>Side question: so could I do like some power shell scripts to just keep adding VMs of a certain image and running the app, and then start shutting them down once I get close to finishing? After generating the VMs would there be some way to kick off the app without having to remote in to each one and running it?</p>