Announcing General Availability of Azure Dl/D/E v6 VMs powered by Intel EMR processor & Azure Boost
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.NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs offering 400K IOPS and 10GBps throughput now generally available
In September 2023, we announced the Public Preview of NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs offering 400K IOPS and 10GBps throughput 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 are announcing the general availability (GA) of accelerated remote storage performance using Azure Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disk within the existing NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 family. The higher storage performance is offered across all Ebsv5 sizes and delivers up to 400K IOPS (I/O operations per second) and 10GBps of remote disk storage throughput. This general availability of accelerated NVMe-Ebsv5 with increased remote storage performance is part of the Azure Boost family which upgrades the fleet with these new capabilities. The NVMe enabled Ebsv5 sizes offer up to 2x the performance of SCSI VM sizes with no additional cost, providing better price-performance. The VM pricing details are available here. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 NVMe VM series In today's competitive business landscape, quickly processing, analyzing, and extracting insights from large volumes of data is essential. OLTP and OLAP applications, which handle real-time transactions, further highlight the need for powerful computing and storage solutions. Companies must adopt robust systems to manage increasing data demands efficiently while keeping costs in check. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM family with NVMe, made generally available in May 2023, meets the performance requirements for many business-critical applications. However, some workloads require even higher VM-to-disk throughput and IOPS performance over Ultra or Premium SSD v2 disk options, which are now served by the accelerated NVMe Ebsv5 VM sizes. Ebsv5 series NVMe VM specifications The E2-112i vCPU sizes with the NVMe provide higher performance than the comparable Ebsv5 SCSI sizes for the same price. The accelerated NVMe-enabled sizes offer up to 400,000 IOPS and 10,000 MBps with Ultra disk and Premium V2 storage offerings. Note the Uncached IOPS/ throughput specs are the same as Ebdsv5 VMs Size vCPU Memory GiB Max uncached disk throughput IOPS/MBps (Ultra/Pv2-SSD) Max burst uncached disk throughput IOPS/MBps (Ultra/Pv2-SSD) Standard_E2bs_v5 2 16 12000/300 15000/1200 Standard_E4bs_v5 4 32 21400/600 30000/1200 Standard_E8bs_v5 8 64 44200/1200 60000/1200 Standard_E16bs_v5 16 128 88400/2300 96000/2600 Standard_E32bs_v5 32 256 174200/4800 180000/5200 Standard_E48bs_v5 48 384 253300/7300 260000/7850 Standard_E64bs_v5 64 512 294800/7800 310000/8500 Standard_E96bs_v5 96 672 390000/8500 390000/9000 Standard_E112ibs_v5 112i 672 400000/10000 400000/10000 For more information, system prerequisite, current restrictions of this offering, please visit Ebsv5/Ebdsv5 specification page. *Please note that you are required to create new Ultra disks for Ebsv5 NVMe for the upgraded performance in the following regions: uswestcentral-AZ01, usstagesc-AZ01, ussouth-AZ02, useast, uscentral-AZ03,uksouth, europewest, europenorth, brazilsouth-AZ03, australiasoutheast-AZ01, asiasoutheast, australiaeast-AZ02,AZ03 All the rest of the regions that aren't listed here doesn't require new Ultra disks creation for upgraded performance 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. “With the recent update of the Ebsv5 NVMe VMs we are now measuring 10 GBPS of throughput and 400K IOPS per VM with Premium SSD v2 disks. That is 30 GBPS and over 1M IOPS in a FlashGrid Cluster with three Oracle RAC database nodes, which is an order of magnitude higher than a typical on-premises storage system” Getting started Learn more about the NVMe Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VMs by reading the FAQ. Learn more about the Azure Boost by reading the aka.ms/azureboost .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.Announcing the preview of new Azure VMs based on the Azure Cobalt 100 processor
Today, Microsoft is announcing the preview of the new Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) featuring the Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based processor. The Cobalt 100 processor is based on the Neoverse N-series (N2) Arm CPU design, which is optimized for the performance of scale out cloud-based applications. The preview includes the general purpose (Dpsv6-series and Dplsv6-series) and memory optimized (Epsv6-series) VM series. To request access to preview, please fill out this form. The new Dpsv6 and Dpdsv6 general purpose VMs are engineered to efficiently run scale-out workloads and cloud native computing solutions such as those running on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS). These VMs are ideal for small to medium open-source databases, application servers and web servers. These VMs also excel with containerized applications and can be leveraged by Arm developers in CI/CD pipelines, development and test scenarios. The new Dplsv6 and Dpldsv6 VMs are ideal for media encoding, small databases, gaming servers, microservices and any workloads that do not require higher RAM per vCPU. Additionally, the Epsv6 and Epdsv6 memory-optimized VMs have higher memory per vCPU to meet the requirements of large databases, in-memory caching applications and data analytics workloads. All the new Cobalt 100 VMs enable customers to seamlessly run modern, dynamic, scalable applications. The Azure Cobalt 100 VMs can deliver up to 1.4x CPU performance, up to 1.5x performance on Java-based workloads and up to 2x performance on web servers, .NET applications and in-memory cache applications compared to previous generation Azure Arm-based VMs. These VMs support 4x local storage IOPS (with NVMe direct) and up to 1.5x network bandwidth compared to the previous generation Azure Arm-based VMs. You can select from a range of Azure virtual machines that meet the CPU performance and memory needs of your workloads. You can choose from three memory ratios for a given vCPU size, giving you the flexibility to select the configuration that works best for your workload. The new Dpsv6-series offers up to 96 vCPUs with 384 GiBs of RAM (4:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio). The new Dplsv6-series offers up to 96 vCPUs with 192 GiBs of RAM (2:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio). The new Epsv6-series offer up to 96 vCPUs with up to 672 GiBs of RAM (up to 8:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio) for more memory intensive workloads. All these VM series are available with and without a local disk so that customers can choose the option that best fits each workload. You can deploy these new VMs using existing methods including the Azure portal, SDKs, APIs, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI). During the preview period, the VMs are available in the Central US, East US, East US 2, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West Europe, and West US 2 Azure regions. The number of regions will continue to expand in 2024 and beyond. Explore future regional availability options by visiting the Azure product availability page. During the preview, the new Azure Cobalt 100 VMs are available for free. However, your Azure subscription will be billed for fees and applicable taxes associated with use of other Azure resources and services, such as disk storage, used in the deployment of these preview VMs. The new virtual machines support all remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD and Ultra Disk storage. To learn more about various disk types and their regional availability, please refer to Azure managed disk type. Disk storage is billed separately from virtual machines. The new Azure Cobalt 100 VMs support a wide range of Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Alma Linux, Azure Linux (via AKS), Flatcar Linux and more. Client application developers can take advantage of Azure’s highly available, scalable, and secure platform to run cloud-based builds and test workflows. For Windows developers, Insider Preview of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise are available for Azure Cobalt 100 VMs. Customers can access the full list of images in the Azure Marketplace. Microsoft has decades of experience with Arm-based technologies through collaborations with software and hardware partners. The preview of the Azure Cobalt 100 VMs continues to showcase Microsoft’s commitment to developing a vibrant Arm ecosystem to accelerate customer innovation and in helping customers build great solutions. Major developer platforms and languages, such as .NET, C++ and Java, provide native Arm support to take advantage of the benefits that this processor architecture brings. Microsoft continues to invest in optimizing these developer platforms and languages on Linux and Windows to leverage the capabilities of the latest Arm architecture. .NET 8 adds numerous optimizations for Arm and C++ similarly brings its share of Arm optimizations with the Visual Studio 17.8 release. Visual Studio 17.10 also introduces SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) for the Arm native Visual Studio. For Java customers, the Microsoft Build of OpenJDK has been built with Arm compiler optimizations and has been certified on Linux and Windows on Arm architectures. GitHub Actions, GitHub's CI/CD workflow engine, is an integral part of many developers’ workflows, and is used to continuously build, test, and deploy apps. GitHub Actions is now available for Windows and Linux on Arm in 2 flavors – self-hosted runners that can be hosted on an Arm VM or Arm device, and GitHub hosted runners that is available in private beta with GA expected later this summer. Containers are a popular deployment target for many reasons - a streamlined development workflow, isolation and security, efficient resource utilization, portability, and reproducibility. Emphasizing its commitment to developer productivity, Docker is now investing in this area by ensuring that Docker Desktop runs natively on Windows on Arm. The rich ecosystem of applications and libraries, compiled natively to Windows on Arm, continues to grow. In addition to the Microsoft products and tools optimized for Arm64, developer and creator tools such as the Unity games editor, Blender, Docker, GIMP and important libraries such as Qt, are all on track to deliver Arm-native versions this year. Our customers have shared their perspective: "Ansys and Microsoft have a long history of collaboration, and we are excited to continue our joint work to advance semiconductor design via the Cobalt 100 chip and the power of Microsoft Azure," said John Lee, vice president and general manager of the semiconductor, electronics, and optics business unit at Ansys. "Through the combined strengths of Ansys simulation expertise and Microsoft's prowess in enabling EDA technologies, Cobalt 100-based solutions will empower designers to economically achieve optimal Power, Performance, and Area in their designs. Together, we will help propel the semiconductor industry into a new era of unparalleled efficiency and productivity.” “We’ve helped thousands of customers in EDA and Systems combine the performance and scalability of the cloud providing ease-of-use and instant access to our powerful computational software, which speeds time-to-market window for innovative designs. We are excited to work with Microsoft Azure on the new Arm-based Azure Cobalt 100 to provide our mutual customers with optimal performance as they tackle the ever-increasing demands of compute, memory capacity, and price performance for gigascale, advanced-node designs.” - Mahesh Turaga, VP of Cloud Business Development, Cadence. “At Elastic, we love working with the Microsoft teams, from silicon to models,” said Shay Banon, co-founder and chief technology officer at Elastic. “The rate of progress on the Azure team is impressive, and we are excited to collaborate with them to bring these benefits to our users as fast as possible.” “At MongoDB, we continuously explore cutting-edge technologies to enhance our solutions. We are currently evaluating Arm for its benefits and price performance, with promising results so far. We have also evaluated the Azure Cobalt 100 VM and are pleased with its capabilities, particularly in handling intensive workloads. We look forward to taking advantage of these advancements to provide best-in-class performance and even better experiences for our customers.” - Andrew Davidson, SVP, Products, MongoDB. "Semiconductor companies must balance the competing priorities of schedule, cost and performance as they develop their products in sustainable and efficient ways. An important aspect of doing this successfully is carefully matching software workloads with the appropriate computing platforms. The combination of Microsoft Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs with Siemens EDA software will provide our mutual customers with an excellent option to meet both their product development and corporate objectives. We continue to partner with Microsoft to create innovative solutions for the semiconductor industry.” - Craig Johnson, Vice President, Siemens EDA Cloud Solutions. “Snowflake, as an early adopter of Azure’s Arm technology, has successfully leveraged Arm-based VMs in Azure for our data warehouse workloads. We are now excited to elevate our performance further with Azure's Cobalt 100 VMs, anticipating significant enhancements in delivering superior customer experience.” - Gabe Bryant, Director of Engineering, Snowflake. “Teradata is thrilled to partner with Microsoft Azure, and their launch of the Cobalt 100 VMs. The density and efficiency benefits will further Teradata's existing price/performance advantage for AI and data-driven workloads, scaled on Teradata’s VantageCloud Lake offering” - Daniel Spurling, SVP, Product Management, Teradata. Here’s what our technology partners are saying: “Customized silicon plays a fundamental role in powering the AI-accelerated workloads of the future. This suite of Azure VMs, powered by the Neoverse CSS -based Azure Cobalt 100, marks a key milestone in our longstanding partnership with Microsoft to unlock new paths to performant, efficient computing and provides Azure users more choice and greater ability to innovate using the vast Arm software ecosystem.” -Dermot O’Driscoll, vice president of product solutions, Infrastructure Line of Business, Arm. “The adoption of Arm-based architectures on Microsoft Azure drives cost efficiency and significant performance enhancements. With the introduction of the Azure Cobalt 100 Arm-based VMs, we are excited that Ubuntu users will see up to a 40% increase in workload performance. Our collaboration with Microsoft ensures that users can fully capitalize on these advancements with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro, optimizing for diverse and demanding workloads including application servers, machine learning platforms, open-source databases, in-memory caches, and cloud-native applications on AKS. This collaboration underscores our dedication to providing robust and scalable solutions that advance the capabilities of developers and enterprises alike.” - Alexander Gallagher, Vice President of Public Cloud, Canonical. “Whether on Azure or in their own datacenter, Red Hat is committed to providing customers with the broadest possible choice in architectures across the hybrid cloud that best meet their unique business requirements. The Cobalt 100 Arm-based Azure VMs offer a new, powerful option for customers to potentially drive greater efficiencies and scale in their operations, and we look forward to exploring how we can best enable these Arm-based processors on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” - Ronald Pacheco, senior director, Red Hat Enterprise Linux Product and Ecosystem Strategy, Red Hat. You can learn more about the new Azure Cobalt 100 VMs by visiting the specification pages: Dpsv6-series, Dpdsv6-series, Dplsv6-series, Dpldsv6-series, Epsv6-series, Epdsv6-series. Have any questions? Please reach us at Azure Support and our experts will be there to help you with your Azure journey. Additional resources: Sign-up form: Cobalt100-VM-Preview-Signup Demo: Cobalt 100 VM demo Related blogs: Arm Holdings Canonical ElasticAnnouncing public preview of new burstable VMs - Bsv2, Basv2 and Bpsv2
We are pleased to announce the public preview of the latest versions of the CPU burstable B family of Azure Virtual Machines. The new additions to the B family consist of 3 new VM series - Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2, each based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C, AMD EPYC™ 7763v, and Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors respectively.New Da/Ea/Fav6 VMs with increased performance and Azure Boost are now generally available
By Sasha Melamed, Senior Product Manager, Azure Compute We are excited to announce General Availability of new Dalsv6, Dasv6, Easv6, Falsv6, Fasv6, and Famsv6-series Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) based on the 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ processor (Genoa). These VMs deliver significantly improved performance and price/performance versus the prior Dasv5 and Easv5 VMs, NVMe connectivity for faster local and remote storage access, and Azure Boost for improved performance and enhanced security. With the broad selection of compute, memory, and storage configurations available with these new VM series, there is a best fit option for a wide range of workloads. What’s New The new Dalsv6, Davs6, and Easv6 VMs are offered with vCPU counts ranging from 2 to 96 vCPUs. The new general purpose and memory optimized VMs will come in a variety of memory (GiB)-to-vCPU ratios, including the Dalsv6 at 2:1, Dasv6 at 4:1, and Easv6 at 8:1 ratios. The VMs are also available with and without a local disk so that you can choose the option that best fits your workload. Workloads can expect up to 20% CPU performance improvement over the Dasv5 and Easv5 VMs and up to 15% better price/performance. Further expanding our offerings, we are proud to introduce the first Compute-optimized VM series based on AMD processors also in three memory-to-vCPU ratios. The new Falsv6, Fasv6, and Famsv6 VMs offer the fastest x86 CPU performance in Azure and have up to 2x CPU performance improvement over our previous v5 VMs, as shown in the graph below. We are excited to announce that the new Dalsv6, Dasv6, Easv6, and suite of Fasv6 virtual machines are powered by Azure Boost. Azure Boost has been providing benefits to millions of existing Azure VMs in production today, such as enabling exceptional remote storage performance and significant improvements in networking throughput and latency. Our latest Azure Boost infrastructure innovation, in combination with new AMD-based VMs, delivers improvements in performance, security, and reliability. The platform provides sub-second servicing capabilities for the most common infrastructure updates, delivering a 10x reduction in impact. To learn more about Azure Boost, read our blog. To drive the best storage performance for your workloads, the new AMD-based VMs come with the NVMe interface for local and remote disks. Many workloads will benefit from improvements over the previous generation of AMD-based with up to: 80% better remote storage performance 400% faster local storage speeds 25% networking bandwidth improvement 45% higher NVMe SSD capacity per vCPU for Daldsv6, Dadsv6, Eadsv6-series VMs with local disks The 4th Gen AMD EPYC™ processors provide new capabilities for these VMs, including: Always-On Transparent Secure Memory Encryption ensuring that your sensitive information remains secure without compromising performance. AVX-512 to handle compute-intensive tasks such as scientific simulations, financial analytics, AI, and machine learning. Vector Neural Network Instructions enhancing the performance of neural network inference operations, making it easier to deploy and scale AI solutions. Bfloat16 for efficient training and inference of deep learning models, providing a balance between performance and precision. Dasv6, Dadsv6, Easv6, Eadsv6, Fasv6, and Fadsv6-series VMs are SAP Certified. Whether you’re running a simple test infrastructure, mission critical enterprise applications, high-performance computing tasks, or AI workloads, our new VMs are ready to meet your needs. Explore the new capabilities and start leveraging the power of Azure today! General-purpose workloads The new Dasv6-series VMs offer a balanced ratio of memory to vCPU performance and increased scalability, up to 96 vCPUs and 384 GiB of RAM. Whereas the new Dalsv6-series VM series are ideal for workloads that require less RAM per vCPU, with a max of 192 GiB of RAM. The Dalsv6 series are the first 2GiB/vCPU memory offerings in our family of AMD-based VMs. The Dalsv6 series can reduce your costs when running non-memory intensive applications, including web servers, gaming, video encoding, AI/ML, and batch processing. The Dasv6-series VMs work well for many general computing workloads, such as e-commerce systems, web front ends, desktop virtualization solutions, customer relationship management applications, entry-level and mid-range databases, application servers, and more. Series vCPU Memory (GiB) Max Local NVMe Disk (GiB) Max IOPS for Local Disk Max Uncached Disk IOPS for Managed Disks Max Managed Disks Throughput (MBps) Dalsv6 2-96 4-192 N/A N/A 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Daldsv6 2-96 4-192 1x110 - 6x880 1.8M 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Dasv6 2-96 8-384 N/A N/A 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Dadsv6 2-96 8-384 1x110 - 6x880 1.8M 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Memory-intensive workloads For more memory demanding workloads, the new Easv6-series VMs offer high memory-to-vCPU ratios with increased scalability up to 96 vCPUs and 672 GiB of RAM. The Easv6-series VMs are ideal for memory-intensive enterprise applications, data warehousing, business intelligence, in-memory analytics, and financial transactions. Series vCPU Memory (GiB) Max Local NVMe Disk (GiB) Max IOPS for Local Disk Max Uncached Disk IOPS for Managed Disks Max Managed Disks Throughput (MBps) Easv6 2-96 16-672 N/A N/A 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Eadsv6 2-96 16-672 1x110 - 6x880 1.8M 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Compute-intensive workloads For compute-intensive workloads, the new Falsv6, Fasv6 and Famsv6 VM series come without Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT), meaning a vCPU equals one physical core. These VMs will be the best fit for workloads demanding the highest CPU performance, such as scientific simulations, financial modeling and risk analysis, gaming, and video rendering. Series vCPU Memory (GiB) Max Uncached Disk IOPS for Managed Disks Max Managed Disks Throughput (MBps) Max Network Bandwidth (Gbps) Falsv6 2-64 4-128 4 - 115K 90 - 2,880 12.5 - 36 Fasv6 2-64 8-256 4 - 115K 90 - 2,880 12.5 - 36 Famsv6 2-64 16-512 4 - 115K 90 - 2,880 12.5 - 36 Customers are excited about new AMD v6 VMs FlashGrid offers software solutions that help Oracle Database users on Azure achieve maximum database uptime and minimize the risk of outages. The Easv6 series VMs make it easier to support Oracle RAC workloads with heavy transaction processing on Azure using FlashGrid Cluster. The NVMe protocol enhances disk error handling, which is important for failure isolation in high-availability database architectures. The CPU boost frequency of 3.7 GHz and higher network bandwidth per vCPU enable database clusters to handle spikes in client transactions better while keeping a lower count of vCPU to limit licensing costs. The Easv6 VMs have passed our extensive reliability and compatibility testing and are now available for new deployments and upgrades. – Art Danielov, CEO, FlashGrid Inc. Helio is a platform for large-scale computing workloads, optimizing for costs, scale, and emissions. Its main focus is 3D rendering Our architectural and media & entertainment (VFX) 3D rendering workloads have been accelerated by an average of ~42% with the new v6 generation, while maintaining low cost and high scale. In addition, we are seeing significant improvements in disk performance with the new NVMe interface, resulting in much faster render asset load times. -- Kevin Häfeli, CEO / Cofounder Helio AG Silk's Software-Defined Cloud Storage delivers unparalleled price/performance for the most demanding, real-time applications. Silk has tested the new Da/Eav6 VM offering from Azure and we are looking forward to enable our customers to benefit from its new capabilities, allowing higher throughput at lower cost, while providing increased reliability” -- Adik Sokolovski, Chief R&D Officer, Silk ZeniMax Online Studios creates online RPG worlds where you can play and create your own stories. The new VMs we tested provided a significant performance boost in our build tasks. The super-fast storage not only made the workflows smoother and faster, but it also helped highlight other bottlenecks in our design and allowed us to improve our pipeline overall. We are excited for their availability and plan on utilizing these machines to expand our workload in Azure. -- Merrick Moss, Product Owner, ZeniMax Online Studios Getting started The new VMs are now available in the East US, East US 2, Central US, South Central US, West US 3, West Europe, and North Europe regions with more to follow. Check out pricing on the following pages for Windows and Linux. You can learn more about the new VMs in the documentation for Dal-series, Da-series, Ea-series, and Fa-series. 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 based v6 series at their respective links.
Effortlessly Migrate Azure VMs between zones
For various reasons you might come across a situation when you need to migrate your Azure VMs from one zone to another. Migrating Azure VMs between zones can be a daunting and time-consuming task, especially when done manually. To tackle this challenge, I developed a Python tool that automates the entire migration process, making it swift and hassle-free. Originally created for my own needs, I’m excited to share it with the broader community, hoping it will simplify your life as well.
