Increased remote storage performance with NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs now generally available

At Microsoft Ignite in October 2022, we announced the preview of NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 Virtual Machine (VM) sizes based on the 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C processor offering higher remote storage performance with Azure Disks. The Ebsv5 VM family is designed for memory-intensive business-critical applications, relational database servers, and in-memory data analytics workloads.

Today, we announce the general availability (GA) of the NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VM series,  with two new sizes, E96 and E112i vCPU, added to the Ebsv5 VM family. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 NVMe VMs offer up to 260,000 IOPS (input/output operations per second) and 8,000MBps of remote disk storage throughput. They also include up to 672GiB of RAM and local SSD storage (maximum 3,800GiB). In addition, the smaller sizes, E48 vCPU, and E64 vCPU, will offer higher performance with NVMe at no extra cost.

These new VMs provide up to three times higher remote storage IOPS and six times higher remote storage throughput performance than the previous generation Ev4. These substantial performance improvements will enable customers to consolidate existing workloads into fewer or smaller VM sizes and achieve potential cost savings on infrastructure and commercial software licensing costs. 

The new NVMe-enabled sizes will be available in 13 Azure regions: USNorth, Southeast Asia, West Europe, Australia East, North Europe, West US 3, UK South, Sweden Central, East US, Central US, West US 2, East US 2, Southcentral US. More regions will be added soon.

The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 NVMe VM series

With the proliferation of data sources and the increasing amount of data generated daily, data-intensive workloads are expected to grow significantly in the coming years. In today's data-driven business environment, rapid processing, analysis, and extracting actionable insights from the increasing volume of data collected is critical for companies to maintain a competitive edge. OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) applications are another example of data processing that manages and executes transaction-oriented applications in real-time. With these demanding requirements, companies require robust computing and storage solutions to keep up with their ever-increasing data processing needs while controlling costs.

The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM family with SCSI, made generally available in April 2022, meets the performance requirements for many business-critical applications. However, some workloads require even higher VM-to-disk throughput and IOPS performance, which are now served by the NVMe Ebsv5 VM sizes.

Ebsv5 series NVMe VM specifications

The E48-112 vCPU sizes with the NVMe provide higher performance than the comparable Ebsv5 SCSI sizes for the same price. The largest sizes offer up to twice as much IOPS and throughput as the SCSI sizes. In addition, the new NVMe-enabled sizes offer up to 260,000 IOPS and 6,500 MBps with Ultra disk and Premium V2 storage offerings.

Ebdsv5 series NVMe VM specifications:

Ebdsv5 series VM Specifications:

Note the Uncached IOPS/ throughput specs are the same as Ebsv5 VMs

Customer Testimonials: We had the opportunity to collaborate with several Azure partners during the preview period. Below is the feedback from some of the partners on the performance of the new VMs:

FlashGrid.io offers solutions to help organizations simplify the management and deployment of their mission-critical databases in the cloud while ensuring high availability, scalability, and performance.

"Flash Grid Cluster users run mission-critical Oracle RAC databases on Azure with sizes of 100+ TB. Storage throughput is key for many of them. In our tests with the new Ebsv5 NVMe VMs, we have measured close to 8000 MBPS of storage throughput, a 2x increase compared to non-NVMe VMs. This increase enables running even larger databases while meeting performance SLAs for large queries, backup, and other heavy storage operations." – Art Danielov, CEO Flash Grid Inc.

Idera provides solutions for organizations to optimize database performance, manage, monitor, and secure them. These solutions include database management, data modeling, and data architecture tools.

"We had the pleasure of testing Azure Ebsv5 VM preview, and it is impressive to see the tremendous performance improvements 2x with our software deployments. We believe our customers will benefit from using this new NVMe offering with their Azure workloads. Again, Microsoft has, and continues to be, a great partner in enabling and empowering technologies for the future for IDERA and its customers". – ­­Principal Cloud and Presales Solutions Architect (Multi-Platform Data Tools Technologies) IDERA.

Getting started

Learn more about the NVMe Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VMs by reading the FAQ. For pricing information, check out Windows and Linux. Also, please verify the Ultra disk and Premium SSD V2 regional availability to pair with the NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 series. Finally, if you need help selecting the best VM for your workload, start with the virtual machine selector.