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.Announcing the public preview of the new Azure FXv2-series Virtual Machines
Today, Microsoft is announcing the public preview of the new Azure FXv2-series Virtual Machines (VMs), based on the 5th Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8573C (Emerald Rapids) processor. The preview includes the Compute-optimized VMs FXmsv2-series and FXmdsv2-series. To request access to the preview, please fill out FXv2-series-Preview-Signup. The new Azure FXv2-series VMs offer several enhancements compared to previous generation (FXv1-series) VMs: up to 1.5x CPU performance 2x vCPUs, with 96 vCPU as the largest VM size 1.5x+ Network bandwidth, and offers up to 70Gbps up to 2x local storage (Read) IOPS and offers up to 5280 GiB local SSD capacity up to 2x IOPS and up to 5x throughput in remote storage performance up to 400k IOPS and up to 11 GBps throughput with Premium v2/ Ultra Disk support up to 1800 GiB memory FXv2-series VMs feature an all-core-turbo frequency up to 4.0 GHz. In addition to the standard sizes, FXv2-series VMs are available in constrained-core sizes, with vCPU count constrained to one-half or one-quarter of the original VM size, giving you the flexibility to select the core and memory configuration that best fits your workloads. These VMs support up to a 21:1 memory-to-vCPU ratio with the base sizes, and an even better ratio with the constrained-core sizes. You also have the option to choose between FXv2-series VMs with and without local disk. These VMs support NVMe interface for both local and remote disks. Additionally, improvements in Azure Boost enhance the networking, storage and overall CPU performance and security of FXv2-series VMs. Finally, these VMs have enhanced AI capabilities with Intel® Advanced Matrix Extension (AMX), delivering higher inference and training performance, and enhanced security capabilities with Total Memory Encryption (TME) technology. You can learn more about the new Azure FXv2-series VMs by visiting the specification pages at FXmdsv2-series and FXmsv2-series. Overall, the FXv2-series Azure Virtual Machine is best-suited to provide a balanced solution for compute-intensive workloads such as databases, data analytics workloads and EDA workloads, that also require large amounts of memory and high-performance, storage, I/O bandwidth. The FXv2-series is purpose-built, designed to address several requirements of SQL Server workloads, particularly those that require higher computing performance, memory, storage, I/O bandwidth but not necessarily a higher core count. Key benefits for SQL Server workloads include: Improved performance: The FXv2-series VMs offer higher and improved performance capabilities, ensuring SQL Server workloads can handle large amounts of data and transactions efficiently. These capabilities are crucial for applications that require high I/O operations per second (IOPS) and low latency. High memory and storage: FXv2-series VMs provide specifications (such as 96 vCPU with up to 1800 GiB memory, up to 400K IOPS and up to 11 GiB remote storage throughput) to cater to the needs of SQL workloads requiring high memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth. Cost efficiency: Constrained vCPU capable VM sizes help reduce the cost of SQL Server licensing by offering an improved memory-to-core ratio while maintaining the same memory, storage, and I/O bandwidth. Local storage: FXmdsv2-series VMs provide local storage for tempdb heavy workloads, significantly improving the performance of SQL Server workloads that need quick access to temporary data. FXv2-series VMs also provide EDA customers with an updated Intel-based option tailored to the needs of the semiconductor community. Features like larger L3 caches, higher instructions per clock, spacious memory, and faster storage compared to the prior generation FXv1 VM combined to make FXv2-series VMs much improved for the demanding needs of EDA workloads, such as reducing chip design turn-around time and time-to-market and improving license utilization. During the preview period, the VMs are available in Azure regions such as West US 3 and Southeast Asia for all VM sizes up to 96 vCPUs. The number of regions will continue to expand in 2024 and beyond. The new virtual machines support all remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD (v1), Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk storage. To learn more about various disk types and their regional availability, please refer to Azure managed disk type and disk storage is billed separately from virtual machines. You can deploy these new VMs using existing methods including Azure portal, SDKs, APIs, PowerShell, and the command-line interface (CLI). The new Azure FXv2-series VMs support a wide range of OS distributions, such as Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, Alma Linux, Windows Client 11 Pro and Enterprise, Windows Server and many more, for developers who want to take advantage of Azure’s highly available, scalable, and secure platform to run cloud-based workloads and test workflows. Customers can access the full list of images in the Azure Marketplace. During the preview, Azure FXv2-series VMs will be charged at full price. To learn more about the pricing of FXv2-series VMs, please visit the Azure Virtual Machines pricing pages. Eligible new Azure customers can sign up for an Azure free account and receive $200 Azure credit. FXv2-series VMs are tailored for compute-intensive tasks, making them perfect for high-performance data processing, complex operations, and intensive analytics, delivering excellent performance and efficiency. The new FXv2-series VMs provide a versatile solution for a wide range of computing needs. Explore the FXv2-series VMs today and discover how these VMs can enhance your performance and operational efficiency. To request access: please fill out FXv2-series-Preview-Signup. Have questions ? Please reach us at Azure Support and our experts will be there to help you with your Azure journey.
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.
Azure Windows Virtual Machine Activation: two new KMS IP addresses (…and why you should care)
This blog contains important information about KMS IP addresses changes that may impact Windows Virtual machine activations for Azure Global Cloud customers who configured custom routes or firewall rules to allow KMS IP addresses. Who will be affected? In July 2022, we announced two new KMS IP addresses, 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53, in Azure Global Cloud via Azure Update - Generally available: New KMS DNS in Azure Global Cloud. We expect that most Azure Windows Virtual Machine customers will not be impacted. However, Azure Global Cloud customers who have followed troubleshooting guides, like the ones listed below, to configure custom routes or firewall rules that allow Windows VMs to reach KMS IP address in the past, must take actions to include these two new KMS IP addresses, 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53. Otherwise, after October 3rd, 2022, your Windows Virtual Machines will report warnings of failing to reach Windows Licensing Servers for activation. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/custom-routes-enable-kms-activation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/troubleshoot-activation-problems https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/protect-azure-virtual-desktop How will customers be affected? As explained in Generally available: New KMS DNS in Azure Global Cloud, most Windows Virtual Machines in Global Cloud rely on new azkms.core.windows.net for Windows Activation. The new azkms.core.windows.net is currently pointing to kms.core.windows.net. After October 3 rd , 2022, azkms.core.windows.net will point to two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53. For customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/custom-routes-enable-kms-activation, without taking the actions to include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53 in custom routes, your Windows Virtual Machines will not be able to connect to new KMS server for Windows Activation. For customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/protect-azure-virtual-desktop, without taking the actions to include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53 in firewall rules, your Windows Virtual Machines will not be able to connect to new KMS server for Windows Activation. When failing to connect to KMS server for activation, Azure Windows Virtual Machines report warnings like the following - “We can't activate Windows on this device as we can't connect to your organization's activation server. Make sure you're connected to your organization's network and try again. If you continue having problems with activation, contact your organization's support person. Error code: 0xC004F074.” As explained in Key Management Services (KMS) activation planning, “KMS activations are valid for 180 days, a period known as the activation validity interval. KMS clients must renew their activation by connecting to the KMS host at least once every 180 days to stay activated. By default, KMS client computers attempt to renew their activation every seven days. After a client's activation is renewed, the activation validity interval begins again”. Within the 180-day KMS activate validity interval, customers can still access the full functionality of the Windows virtual machine. Customers should fix activation issues during the 180-day KMS activation validity interval. Action required To customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/custom-routes-enable-kms-activation, include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53 in custom routes before October 3 rd , 2022. To customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/protect-azure-virtual-desktop, include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53 in firewall rules before October 3 rd , 2022. How to check You can remote login to your Windows Virtual Machines and complete the following: Open PowerShell. Run the following command to confirm the connectivity to new KMS IP addresses: test-netconnection azkms.core.windows.net -port 1688 test-netconnection 20.118.99.224 -port 1688 test-netconnection 40.83.235.53 -port 1688 If the connections are successful, no more action is needed. If the connection(s) fails, you need to go to the “Action required” section. Important timeline After October 3 rd , 2022, most Azure Windows Virtual Machines will rely on two new KMS IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53 for Windows Activation, when azkms.core.windows.net points to these two new IP addresses. After March 1 st , 2023, all Azure Windows Virtual Machines will rely on two new KMS IP addresses 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53 for Windows Activation, when kms.core.windows.net points to 20.118.99.224.Public Preview: Custom metrics for rolling upgrades on Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Today we are announcing the public preview of custom metrics for rolling upgrades on Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Custom metrics for rolling upgrades enables you to utilize the application health extension to emit custom metrics to your Virtual Machine Scale Set. These custom metrics can be used to tell the scale set the order in which virtual machines should be updated when a rolling upgrade is triggered. Custom metrics can also inform your scale set when an upgrade should be skipped on a specific instance. Custom metrics can be used in combination with other rolling upgrade functionality such as automatic OS upgrades, automatic extension upgrades and MaxSurge rolling upgrades. Key benefits More control over the order in which instances are upgraded. Skip upgrades on specific instances while ensuring the rest of the fleet is upgraded. Integrates with rolling upgrade policy, application health extension, automatic OS upgrades, and automatic extension upgrades. Phase ordering A phase is a grouping construct for virtual machines. Each phase is determined by setting metadata emitted from the application health extension via the customMetrics property. The Virtual Machine Scale Set takes the information retrieved from the custom metrics and uses it to place virtual machines into their assigned phases. Within each phase, the Virtual Machine Scale set will also assign upgrade batches. Each batch is configured using the rolling upgrade policy which takes into consideration the update domains (UD), fault domains (FD), and zone information of each virtual machine. Skip upgrade Skip upgrade functionality enables an individual instance to be omitted from an upgrade during the rolling upgrade. This is similar to utilizing instance protection but can more seamlessly integrate into the rolling upgrade workflow and into instance level applications. Similar to phase ordering, the skip upgrade information is passed to the Virtual Machine Scale Set via the application health extension and custom metrics settings. When the rolling upgrade is triggered, the Virtual Machine Scale Set checks the response of the application health extensions custom metrics and if skip upgrade is set to true, the instance is not included in the rolling upgrade. Available Now Custom metrics for rolling upgrades is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about custom metrics for rolling upgrades on Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
General Availability Announcement: VMSS Zonal Expansion
The Azure VMSS Zonal Expansion feature is now generally available. This significant enhancement allows customers to transition their virtual machine scale sets from a regional to zonal resiliency strategy or add additional zones to a scale set. By distributing VMs across multiple zones, customers can significantly enhance their business continuity and resilience, achieving a higher availability Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% compared to the previous 99.95%. The Azure VMSS Zonal Expansion feature simplifies the migration process, enabling customers to update their scale set environment to the Azure recommended zone-redundant availability strategy without the need to delete and recreate instances or experience application downtime. This means that businesses can now take full advantage of the improved availability and reliability offered by Azure availability zones, ensuring their applications remain highly available and resilient to potential disruptions. For more information, visit https://aka.ms/vmss-zonal-expansionGeneral Availability: MaxSurge for Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Today we are announcing the general availability of MaxSurge upgrades for Virtual Machine Scale Sets. MaxSurge can help improve service uptime during upgrade events. Rolling upgrades with MaxSurge creates new instances with the latest scale set model to replace instances running with the old model. By creating new instances instead of upgrading instances in place, you can ensure that your scale set capacity doesn't drop below the set instance count during the duration of the upgrade process. Key Benefits Perform instance updates without reducing scale set capacity. Ensure newly created VMs are healthy prior to moving onto additional updates. Improve application uptime during upgrades. Configure rolling upgrades with MaxSurge Enabling or disabling MaxSurge can be done during or after scale set provisioning. Additionally, MaxSurge is directly associated with the rolling upgrade policy which enables you to configure settings such as batch size, pause time between batches, and prioritizing unhealthy instances first. Available Now Rolling upgrades with MaxSurge is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about MaxSurge rolling upgrades for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.General Availability: Standby Pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration
Today we are announcing the general availability of standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration. Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets enables you to increase scaling performance by creating a pool of pre-provisioned virtual machines. The virtual machines in the standby pool complete all post provisioning processes such as installing applications, downloading data packages, etc. Once the virtual machines have been fully provisioned, they can be maintained in a running or a stopped (deallocated) state. Whenever a scale out event is triggered, the instances in the standby pool are automatically moved into the scale set. Key Benefits Significantly reduce the time it takes to scale out a Virtual Machine Scale Set. Complete all post provisioning steps in the standby pool. Maintain a pool of deallocated instances to reduce costs while still significantly reducing scale out latency. Works alongside your scale set to maintain the desired capacity. Create a standby pool Navigate to your Virtual Machine Scale Set. Under Availability + scale select Standby pool. Select Manage pool. Provide a name for your pool, provisioning state and maximum and minimum ready capacity. Select Save. You can also configure a standby pool during Virtual Machine Scale Set creation by navigating to the Management tab and checking the box to enable standby pools. Once the standby pool is created and the instances have successfully reached the desired power state, any scaling events triggered on the scale set will automatically use instances from the standby pool. If at any point in time more instances are requested than available in the standby pool, the scale set will default to creating new instances directly in the scale set. Available now Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
