Azure compute offers a rich development environment and IaaS capabilities that can help you develop a broad range of applications. For each type of application, you can select the right VM that best suits your needs. We continue to expand and enrich the variety of VMs available to you, so you can continue to fuel your innovation and growth to Azure.
Products recently introduced include:
1. M-Series VMs now certified for SAP HANA:
You can now develop applications on Azure for the SAP HANA platform that has been recently certified for M-Series. The M-series family of Azure virtual machines are the largest memory-optimized VMs to date. These VMs are ideal for heavy in-memory workloads such as SAP HANA. With the M-Series, these databases can load large datasets into memory and utilize the fast memory access with huge amounts of vCPU parallel processing to speed up queries and enable real-time analytics. You can deploy these large workloads in minutes and on-demand, scaling elastically as your usage demands.
2. NVIDIA’s latest GPU for HPC and AI is available in Azure:
For those of you focused on HPC applications and AI, not too long ago we announced major expansion of our GPU fleet. NVIDIA GPUs are at the heart of a lot of discovery and innovation. And with our tools like Batch, Batch AI, and the Data Science Virtual Machine images, Azure customers and developers are in a great position to expand what is possible and bring to market innovative AI and HPC applications.https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/ncv3-vms-generally-available-other-gpus-expanding-regions/ NCv3 brings NVIDIA’s latest GPU – the Tesla V100 – to our best-in-class HPC, machine learning, and AI products to bring huge amounts of value across a variety of industries. One preview customer told us their speech recognition models trained in less than 20 minutes, instead of the 1-2 hours that previous generation GPUs required. Another customer told us about the 40-50% performance boost they saw on their reservoir simulations.
The ND-series, powered by NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs based on the new Pascal Architecture, will be excellent for training and inference. These instances will provide more than twice the performance over the previous generation for AI workloads utilizing CNTK, TensorFlow, Caffe, and other frameworks. The ND-series also offer a much larger GPU memory size (24 gigabytes), enabling you to fit much larger neural net models. Also, like our NC-series, the ND-series will offer RDMA and InfiniBand connectivity, so you will be able to run large-scale training jobs spanning hundreds of GPUs.
BACKGROUND INFO
Entry Level
A-series VMs have CPU performance and memory configurations best suited for entry-level workloads like development and test. They are economical and provide a low-cost option to get started with Azure. Azure. Av2 Standard is the latest generation of A-series VMs with similar CPU performance but more RAM per vCPU and faster disks.
Example use cases include development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small-to-medium databases, servers for proof-of-concepts, and code repositories.
Starting from $11.68 /per month
Burstable
B-series are economical virtual machines that provide a low-cost option for workloads that typically run at a low-to-moderate baseline CPU utilization, but sometimes need to burst to significantly higher CPU utilization when the demand rises.
Example use cases include development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, and build servers.
Starting from $3.80 /per month
General Purpose
D-series VMs feature fast CPUs, and optimal CPU-to-memory configuration making them suitable for most production workloads. Dv2-series instances carry more powerful CPUs and the same memory and disk configurations as the D-series.
D2-64 v3 instances are the latest hyper-threaded generation of general-purpose instances and are based on the 2.3 GHz Intel XEON ® E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) processor. They can achieve 3.5 GHz with Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. The Ds-series supports Azure Premium SSDs.
Starting from $41.61 /per month
Compute Intensive
F-series VMs feature a higher CPU-to-memory ratio. They are equipped with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB of local solid-state drive (SSD) per CPU core and are optimized for compute intensive workloads. The Fsv2-series features 2 GB RAM and 8 GB of local temporary storage (SSD) per vCPU. The Fsv2-series is hyper-threaded and based on the 2.7 GHz Intel Xeon® Platinum 8168 (Skylake) processor, which can achieve clock speeds as high as 3.7 GHz with the Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0.
Example use cases include scenarios like batch processing, web servers, analytics, and gaming.
Azure now offers the fastest Intel Xeon Scalable processor, code-named Skylake, in the public cloud. In Azure, we have seen growing demand for massive large-scale computation by customers doing financial modeling, scientific analysis, genomics, geothermal visualization, and deep learning. Our drive to continuously innovate in Azure allows us to offer cost-effective and best-in-class hardware for these world-changing workloads.
Starting from $35.77 /per month
Largest Memory Optimized
The M-series family of Azure virtual machines are the largest memory optimized VMs to date. These VMs are ideal for heavy in-memory workloads, such as SAP HANA. With the M-series, these databases can load large datasets into memory and utilize the fast memory access with huge amounts of vCPU parallel processing to speed up queries and enable real-time analytics. You can deploy these large workloads in minutes and on-demand, scaling elastically as your usage demands.
Starting from $1,121.65 /per month
G-series VMs feature the latest Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family, two times more memory, and four times more Solid-State Drive storage (SSDs) than the General-Purpose D-series. G-series sport RAM of up to ½ TB and 32 CPU cores, and provide unparalleled computational performance, memory, and local SSD storage for your most demanding applications. Example use cases include large SQL and NoSQL databases, ERP, SAP, and data warehousing solutions.
Staring from $320.47 /per month
Optimized for in-memory hyper-threaded applications, the E-series family of Azure virtual machines are optimized for heavy in-memory applications such as SAP HANA. These VMs are set up with high memory-to-core ratios that make them well-suited for relational database servers, with medium-to-large caches, and in-memory analytics. The E-series VMs range from 2 to 64 vCPUs and 16 to 432 GiB RAM, respectively.
Starting from $91.98 /per month
Graphics Intensive N Series
The N-series is a family of Azure Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities. GPUs are ideal for compute and graphics-intensive workloads, helping customers to fuel innovation through scenarios like high-end remote visualization, deep learning, and predictive analytics.
The N-series has three different offerings aimed at specific workloads:
- The NC-series is focused on high-performance computing and machine learning workloads. The latest version—NCv3—features NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 GPU.
- The ND-series is focused on training and inference scenarios for deep learning. It uses the NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs. The latest version – NDv2 – features the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
- The NV-series enables powerful remote visualization workloads and other graphics-intensive applications backed by the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU.
NCv3, NCv2, NC and ND VMs offer optional InfiniBand interconnect to enable scale-up performance.
One preview customer told us their speech recognition models trained in less than 20 minutes, instead of the 1-2 hours that previous generation GPUs required. Another customer told us about the 40-50% performance boost they saw on their reservoir simulations.
Starting from $657 /per month
High Performance Computing
The HB-series VMs are optimized for HPC applications driven by memory bandwidth, such as fluid dynamics, explicit finite element analysis, and weather modeling. HB VMs feature 60 AMD EPYC 7551 processor cores, 4 GB of RAM per CPU core, no hyper threading, and up to 4 Managed Disks. The AMD EPYC platform provides more than 260 GB/sec of memory bandwidth.
The HC-series VMs are optimized for HPC applications driven by intensive computation, such as implicit finite element analysis, reservoir simulation, and computational chemistry. HC VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core, no hyper threading, and up to 4 Managed Disks. The Intel Xeon Platinum platform supports Intel’s rich ecosystem of software tools and features an all-cores clock speed of 3.4 GHz for most workloads.
Azure offers a comprehensive set of compute options for all types of apps, including entry-level, general purpose, memory optimized, storage optimized, and compute intensive.
Our HPC and GPU fleet has fast performance with built-in InfiniBand support.
- H-series: InfiniBand networking (industry-leading)
- SAP Large Instances up to 20 TB (industry-leading)
- Fast networking (FPGA) – up to 30 GB/s from 25 GB/s last year (industry-leading)
