Announcing Preview of New Azure Dnl/Dn/En v6 VMs powered by Intel 5th Gen processor & Azure Boost

We are thrilled to announce the public preview of Azure's first Network Optimized VMs powered by the latest 5th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor offering unparalleled performance and flexibility. The network optimized VMs will be relevant for workloads such as network virtual appliances, large-scale e-commerce applications, express route​, application gateway, central DNS and monitoring servers​, firewall​s, media processing tasks that involve transferring large amounts of data quickly, and any workloads that require the ability to handle a high number of user connections and data transfers.

Network Optimized VMs enhance networking performance by providing hardware acceleration for initial connection setup for certain traffic types, a task previously performed in software. These VMs will have lower end-to-end latency for initially establishing a connection or initial packet flow, as well as allow a VM to scale up the number of connections it manages more quickly. These Intel-based VMs come with three different memory-to-core ratios and offer options with and without local SSD across the VM families: Dnsv6, Dndsv6, Dnlsv6, Dnldsv6, Ensv6 and Endsv6 series. There are 55 VM sizes in total, ranging from 2 to 192 vCPU and up to 1.8TB of memory.  The new Network Optimized VMs have higher network bandwidth per vCPU, numbers of vNICs per vCPU and connections per second.

What’s New

Compared to the current Intel Dl/D/Ev6 VMs, the network optimized VMs have: 

• Up to 3x improvement in NW BW/vCPU than the current generation Intel Dl/D/Ev6 VMs 

• 2x vNIC allocation on smaller vCPU sizes 

• Up to 200 Gbps VM network bandwidth  

• Up to 8x CPS connections enhancement across sizes 

• Up to 192vCPU and >18GiB of memory  

• Azure Boost which enables:  

• • Up to 400k IOPS and 12 GB/s remote storage throughput  

• • Up to 200 Gbps VM network bandwidth  

• NVMe interface for local and remote disks  
• Enhanced security through Total Memory Encryption (TME) technology   

Customers are excited about the new Azure Dnl/Dn/Ensv6 VMs

“Palo Alto Networks, the global cybersecurity leader, is working with Microsoft to bring best-in-class Network Virtual Appliance performance capabilities to their customers. As the performance needs of customers on Azure continue to grow, innovations like Network Optimized VMs, Azure Boost, and Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA) technology will help ensure that both our VM Series network virtual appliance and Cloud NGFW, our Azure native firewall service, can scale efficiently and cost-effectively,” said Rich Campagna, SVP Products, Palo Alto Networks. “We look forward to continuing our partnership with Microsoft to bring these innovations to life."

General Purpose Workloads - Dnlsv6, Dnldsv6, Dnsv6, Dndsv6 

The new Network Optimized Dnlsv6-series and Dnsv6 series VMs offer a balance of memory to CPU performance with increased scalability of up to 128 vCPUs and 512 GiB of RAM. Below is an overview of the specifications offered by the Dnlsv6-series and Dnsv6 series VMs. 

Memory Intensive Workloads - Ensv6 and Endsv6  

The new Network Optimized Ensv6-series and Endsv6-series virtual machines are ideal for memory-intensive workloads offering up to 192vCPU and 1.8 TiB of RAM. Below is an overview of specifications offered by the Ensv6-series and Endsv6-series VMs. 

The Dnlv6, Dnv6, and Env6-series Azure Virtual Machines will offer options with and without local disk storage. These VMs are also compatible with remote persistent disk options including Premium SSD, Premium SSD v2, and Ultra Disk. 

Join the Preview  

Dnlv6, Dnv6, and Env6 series VMs are now available for preview in US East. VMs above 96 vCPUs and the VM series with local disk will be supported later in the preview.

To request access to the preview, please fill out the survey form here. We look forward to hearing from you.