Announcing the general availability of Azure Laosv4, Lasv4, and Lsv4 storage optimized VMs

By Rishi Gomatam, Senior Product Manager, Azure Compute

We are excited to announce the general availability of the Laosv4-series, Lasv4-series, and Lsv4-series Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).

These new L-series VMs offer up to 23TB of high performance local NVMe SSDs along with significant improvements in CPU, networking, and remote storage performance as compared to the prior Lsv3 and Lasv3 VM families. These VMs are powered by Azure Boost SSDs, part of Azure Boost, which provide high performance encryption at rest, reduced latencies to NVMe local disks, and enable L-series v4 VMs to deliver local disk IOPS performance of up to 6.6M IOPS on the largest Lsv4 and Lasv4 sizes. Azure Boost also enables exceptional NVMe remote storage performance, significant improvements in networking throughput and latency, and sub-second servicing capabilities for the most common infrastructure updates, delivering a 10x reduction in impact.

Additionally, the L-series v4 VMs enable an expanded array of vCPU and storage ratio configurations, providing more flexibility to meet a wider range of IO-intensive workloads.

Laosv4-series - New Dense IO Optimized VM Family

We are excited to debut Laosv4, based on the 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors (Genoa). Laosv4 is a brand-new L-series VM family that optimizes for dense IO workloads with the following enhancements over the previous generation Lasv3 VMs:

• 3x larger local storage capacity/vCPU
• Up to 20% average CPU performance improvement
• Up to 3x higher remote storage throughput/vCPU
• Up to 3x higher networking bandwidth/vCPU at larger sizes
• Up to 50% lower price per TB of local storage

Laosv4 VMs have sizes ranging from 2-32 vCPU, with 8GB of memory and 720GB of local NVMe disk capacity per vCPU.

These VMs, powered by Azure Boost and Azure Boost SSDs, enable NVMe local SSD disk encryption by default and come with an NVMe remote storage interface with support for premium storage caching, significantly improving remote storage performance. 

Laosv4 VMs are perfect for distributed, scale-out workloads that require high amounts of local storage capacity per vCPU and the ability to move that data quickly over the network or to an Azure remote storage backend.  Workloads like storage caching layers, Elasticsearch, distributed file systems, big data analytics, relational & NoSQL databases, and data warehouses all benefit from the dense storage capabilities of Laosv4 VMs.

The 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors (Genoa) provide new capabilities for Laosv4 VMs, including:

• Always-On Transparent Secure Memory Encryption (TSME) 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 (VNNI) 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.

Lsv4-series and Lasv4-series 

Lsv4-series VMs, based on the 5^th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (Emerald Rapids), and Lasv4-series VMs, based on the 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processor (Genoa), are now generally available. These new local storage optimized L-series VMs offer high capacity, high performance, and low latency local NVMe SSDs, making them well suited for scale-up or scale-out storage workloads that need a balance of SSD capacity, compute, and memory. These VMs are perfect for big data, relational/NoSQL databases, data analytics, and data warehousing workloads. Examples include Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera, Spark, Elastic Search, Redis, and other data-intensive applications.

Lsv4 and Lasv4 VMs have sizes ranging from 2-96 vCPU, with 8GB of memory and 240GB of local NVMe disk capacity per vCPU, with the largest sizes offering up to 23TB of local storage capacity. These VMs introduce new 2, 4, and 96 vCPU sizes which give you more configuration options to right-size your storage optimized VMs to your workload.

Lsv4 and Lasv4 deliver significant gen-on-gen CPU performance improvements, with Lsv4 and Lasv4 enabling up to 20% better average CPU performance compared to Lsv3 and Lasv3. Additionally, these VMs are powered by Azure Boost SSDs, enabling Lsv4 and Lasv4 VMs to hit up to 6.6M IOPS on the largest sizes.

These VMs are also powered by Azure Boost, which enables exceptional NVMe remote storage performance, significant improvements in networking through and latency, and sub-second servicing capabilities for the most common infrastructure updates, delivering a 10x reduction in impact.

The Lsv4 VMs are based on the 5^th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (Emerald Rapids) which enable 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.  Additionally, the Lsv4 VMs introduce the new Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA), a next-generation network interface that provides stable, forward-compatible device drivers for Windows and Linux operating systems. 

The Lasv4 VMs (like the Laosv4 VMs) are based on the 4th Generation AMD EPYC™ processors (Genoa) which enable the same new capabilities discussed earlier such as TSME, AVX-512, VNNI, and Bfloat16.

Customers are excited about the new Azure L-series v4 VMs

Silk provides Software-Defined Cloud Storage to enable data-intensive workloads such as AI/ML. The platform virtualizes cloud storage to deliver breakthrough performance, efficiency, and copy data management capabilities.

“Silk has thoroughly tested Azure’s new Laosv4 VM and will take full advantage of its advanced capabilities. This cutting-edge solution raises the bar for efficiency and reliability with more than 50% cost/performance improvement, delivering the performance and manageability customers demand from their cloud provider.” - Adik Sokolovski, Chief R&D Officer, Silk

Sprinklr is a leading enterprise software company for all customer-facing functions. With native AI, the Sprinklr unified customer experience management (Unified-CXM) platform helps companies make every customer experience extraordinary.

"Migrating from L16as_v3 instances to L16aos_v4 instances was seamless, with no major interruptions, making it an ideal choice for our hot-cold architecture. Despite using fewer CPUs, Laosv4 delivered equal or better performance, optimizing both cost and efficiency. Additionally, we observed a noticeable drop in disk utilization, further improving system stability and responsiveness. This transition has significantly enhanced our infrastructure while maintaining high performance." – Abhay Bansal, SVP Engineering, Sprinklr

Elastic is the leading data analytics platform for Observability, Security, and Search powered applications.

“We benchmarked Elasticsearch on the new Laosv4 VM series running on AMD’s 4th Generation EPYC™ 9004 Genoa processors and observed up to 30% better throughput compared to the previous generation Lsv3 VM series. These results make it an excellent choice for the Elastic Search AI Platform on Azure, and we’re optimistic about the performance benefits it will bring to our users.” - Yuvraj Gupta, Principal Product Manager, Elastic

Microsoft Azure Data Explorer is a fast, fully managed data analytics service for real-time analysis on large volumes of data streaming from applications, websites, IoT devices, and more.

“The Lasv4 and Laosv4 VMs take a significant leap forward in performance for interactive big data analytics. With a newer generation of high-performance CPUs tightly integrated with ultra-fast NVMe SSD storage, it delivers even greater speed and efficiency while maintaining affordability. Azure Data Explorer and Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence Eventhouse both harness the power of Lasv4 and Laosv4 to bring these enhancements directly to customers, enabling faster, more cost-effective telemetry, log, and time series analytics. Workloads that were previously cost-prohibitive are now fully within reach."
— Uri Barash, Partner Group Product Manager, Microsoft

Getting Started

Laosv4 and Lasv4 VMs are generally available in North Europe, West Europe, East US, East US 2, Central US, South Central US, UK South, West US, West US 2, and West US 3.

Lsv4 VMs are generally available in Australia East, Canada Central, Central US, Central India, East US, East US 2, Germany West Central, Japan East, Korea Central, South Africa North, South Central US, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, West Europe, and West US 3.

You can learn more about the new Azure Laosv4, Lasv4, and Lsv4 VMs by visiting the specification pages below:

• Laosv4
• Lasv4
• Lsv4