It is a common practice to place the transaction logs (*.ldf) on a separate physical disk system than database files (*.mdf, *.ndf).
In a virtual machine cloud environment, is it okay to put the transaction logs on the same drive letter as the other data files? How is this usually handled in popular cloud virtual machine environments of today.
NOTE: Not using SQL Azure. Using a Windows virtual machine with full access.
In my extensive testing of cloud SQL on cloud servers (rackspace cloud, to be specific), I found that splitting the ldf and mdf to distinct block storage volumes made a significant improvement in performance. I achieved really hot performance by putting the ldf on an SSD based block storage volume and the mdf on a standard block storage volume.
Ultimately, of course, a block storage volume is a shared SAN somewhere. And local "instance" storage is on the hypervisor itself. So the hardware topology of your cloud environment will dictate what config will work best.
Depends on the cloud environment you're using but typically it makes sense to put them on the same logical drive. If you need additional IOPS you can stripe across multiple volumes but still present a single drive.
In a cloud environment you are not the sole consumer of the storage you are allocated. You get a small slice of a very large pie and as such all IO is random in nature. There is nothing to be gained from trying to separate sequential access (log) from random (data).
Nothing to be gained from the recovery angle either as you can't insist that the two volumes will be allocated from different arrays. Also, there tends to be a different class of protection afforded to the availability of storage from the big players. Azure storage for example is triple replicated within the data centre, with an additional copy replicated to a failover data centre by default.
