Announcing General Availability of Azure Dl/D/E v6 VMs powered by Intel EMR processor & Azure Boost

Co-authored by Stefanie Lemon, Principal PDM manager, Andy Jia, Principal Product Manager, and Misha Bansal, Product Manager, Azure Compute

Today we are excited to announce General Availability of the new Azure General Purpose and Memory Optimized Virtual Machines powered by the 5^th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (code-named Emerald Rapids). The new virtual machines are available in three different memory-to-core ratios and offer the option of with or without local NVMe SSD. The General Purpose families include Dlsv6, Dldsv6, Dsv6, and Ddsv6-series. The Memory Optimized families include Esv6 and Edsv6-series.

What’s New

The new Azure Dl/D/Ev6 VMs deliver several improvements over the previous generation. The general purpose Dv6 and Dlv6 VMs offer a balance of memory to CPU performance with increased scalability of up to 128 vCPUs and 512 GiBs of RAM. These VMs are powerful for general computing workloads, e-commerce systems, web front ends, desktop virtualization solutions, and more. The Ev6 VMs offer robust capabilities, supporting up to 192 vCPUs and 1.8TiB of memory.  Azure Boost significantly enhances VM performance, enabling up to 400k IOPS and 12 GB/s throughput of remote storage, along with up to 200 Gbps VM network bandwidth (the sizes that can achieve those performance threshold, higher memory E128 and E192 sizes, will be available in Q2). The inclusion of an NVMe interface for both local and remote disks ensures fast, low-latency storage performance. The NVMe interface has enhanced the local storage IOPS by 3X. Additionally, these VMs introduce the new Microsoft Azure Network Adaptor (MANA), a next-generation network interface that provides stable, forward-compatible device drivers for Windows and Linux operating systems. Lastly, security has been bolstered with Intel® Total Memory Encryption (Intel® TME) technology, providing enhanced protection to data in system memory.

The Azure VMs are engineered to deliver exceptional performance. Depending on the VM size, the new Dv6 and Ev6 VMs improve performance between 15% and up to 30% measured in SPEC CPU Integer benchmark. The graph below shows the relevant workloads that were tested on the Dsv6 VM, compared to the Dsv5 generation.

*The graph above compares Dsv6 based on the 5^th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (codenamed Emerald Rapids) versus Dsv5 based on the 3^rd Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (codenamed Ice Lake).

Accelerate AI Innovation

The new Azure Dl/D/E v6 VMs deliver a 4x increase in AI inference workloads from the previous generation VMs. This is thanks to the new Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (Intel® AMX), which accelerates artificial intelligence and machine learning workloads. The graph below illustrates the increase in performance of the ResNet50 INT8, a convolutional neural network architecture that excels at image classification, in comparison to the previous generation.

Customers are excited about the new Azure Dl/D/E v6 VMs

“We have done extensive testing of the Esv6 VMs and are excited to add them as supported with FlashGrid Cluster. What stands out with these new VM types is the combination of high storage throughput up to 7935 MBPS and high network bandwidth up to 54 Gbps. Both are critical for heavy database workloads and for handling large amounts of data. The Esv6 VMs enable the use of FlashGrid Cluster for even very large Oracle RAC databases of 100+ TB in size.” – Art Danielov, CEO, FlashGrid Inc.

Through our collaboration with Microsoft, we recently had the opportunity to test the Eseries v6 SKUs in preview—and the results have exceeded expectations. The E-series v6 SKUs deliver remarkable performance enhancements. Our benchmarks show a 98% increase in high-capacity database transaction performance, a 23% average lower read latency, and a 51% average lower write latency. In composite compute testing, we see an astounding 25% overall performance increase. This improvement directly translates into faster data processing and a more responsive customer experience. One of the standout advancements in the v6 series is the introduction of larger SKU options, which has been a game-changer for us. – ServiceNow

“Amadeus runs many performance sensitive workloads, so we are always looking for VM performance improvements for CPU or I/O bound workloads.  Recently, we had the opportunity to test Standard_D32(d)s_v6 and Standard_E32(d)s_v6 machines with Intel Emerald Rapids CPU cores. On our CPU intensive OLTP workload, we have noticed a gain of +16% in throughput (transactions per second) for single threaded workloads, and +32% for multi-threaded workloads compared to the previous generation of VMs (v5). On the storage front, we have run Oracle database redo logging and archiving benchmarks showing excellent performance from the new NVMe interface for both remote and local managed disks. We can’t wait to use those machines at scale for our application and database tier.” - Didier Spezia, Director, Cloud Design Authority, Amadeus

Specifications of Dlv6 and Dv6 Series

The new Dlsv6, Dldsv6, Dsv6, and Ddsv6-series General Purpose VMs provide increased scalability and performance. These new VMs have 5x larger CPU cache size (from 60MB to 300MB), higher memory bandwidth, and faster NVMe-enabled local and remote storage and larger local storage capacity. The new VMs are seen to offer up to 30% better CPU performance over the previous generation VMs and are enabled with Azure Boost. The performance increase is seen across various workloads including Web, Database, and Gen AI.

Below is an overview of the specifications offered by the Dsv6-series and Dlsv6-series VMs.

Specifications of Ev6 Series

The new Esv6-series and Edsv6-series virtual machines are engineered for Memory-Optimized workloads offering up to 192vCPU and 1832 GiB of RAM. These VMs are suitable to meet requirements associated with most enterprise applications, such as relational database servers, data warehousing workloads, business intelligence applications, in-memory analytics. The new VMs offer up to a 30% increase in performance compared to the previous generation, Ev5-series, and provide an NVMe interface and higher capacity for local and remote storage disks.

Below is an overview of specifications offered by the Esv6-series and Edsv6-series VMs.

*Note that E128 and E192 sizes will be generally available in Q2 this year.

Getting Started

The new VMs are now available in East US, West Europe, East US 2, North Europe, Central US, West US 3, UK South, South Central US, Southeast Asia, West US, Canada Central, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, Germany West Central, Spain Central, Italy North, Japan East, Australia East, France Central, Poland Central, with more to follow in the next few weeks. The large E Sizes (E128 and E192) will be generally available in Q2 this year. Check out pricing on the pages for Windows and Linux.

We also recommend reading the NVMe overview and FAQ. You can find the Ultra disk and Premium SSD V2 regional availability to pair with the new NVMe-enabled v6 series at their respective links.