We are excited to announce the public preview of 160 and 192vCore compute sizes for Premium-series hardware configuration in Azure SQL Database Hyperscale. Since the introduction of Premium-series hardware configurations for Hyperscale in November 2022, many customers have successfully used larger vCore configurations to consolidate workloads, reduce shard counts, and improve overall application performance and stability.
This preview builds on the Premium-series configuration introduced previously for Hyperscale, extending the maximum scale of a single database and elastic pools from 128vCores to 192vCores to support higher concurrency, faster CPU performance, and larger memory footprints, for more demanding mission critical workloads. With this preview, customers running largescale OLTP, HTAP, and analytics-heavy workloads can evaluate even higher compute ceilings without rearchitecting their applications.
Premium-Series Hyperscale Hardware Overview
Premium-series Hyperscale databases run on latest-generation Intel and AMD processors , delivering higher per core performance and improved scalability compared to standard-series (Gen5) hardware. With this public preview release, Premium-series Hyperscale now supports larger vCore configurations, extending the scaleup limits for customers who need more compute and memory in a single database.
Getting started
Customers can enable the 160 or 192vCore Premium-series options when creating a database, or when scaling up existing Hyperscale databases in supported regions (where preview capacity is available).
As with other Hyperscale scale operations, moving to a larger vCore size does not require application changes and uses Hyperscale’s distributed storage and compute architecture.
Resource Limits & Key characteristics
Link to Azure SQL documentation on resource limits
Single Database Resource Limits
|
Cores |
Memory (GB) |
Tempdb max data size (GB) |
Max Local SSD IOPS |
Max Log Rate (MiB/s) |
Max concurrent workers |
Max concurrent external connections per pool |
Max concurrent sessions |
|
128 (Current Limit) |
625
|
4,096 |
544,000 |
150 |
12,800 |
150 |
30,000 |
|
160 (New preview limit) |
830 |
4,096 |
680,000 |
150 |
16,000 |
150 |
30,000 |
|
192 (New preview limit) |
843* |
4,096 |
816,000 |
150 |
19,200 |
150 |
30,000 |
*Memory values will increase for 192 vCores at GA.
Elastic Pool Resource Limits
|
Cores |
Memory (GB) |
Tempdb max data size (GB) |
Max Local SSD IOPS |
Max Log Rate (MiB/s) |
Max concurrent workers per pool |
Max concurrent external connections per pool |
Max concurrent sessions |
|
128 (Current Limit) |
625
|
4,096 |
409,600 |
150 |
13,440 |
150 |
30,000 |
|
160 (New preview limit) |
830 |
4,096 |
800,000 |
150 |
16,800 |
150 |
30,000 |
|
192 (New preview limit) |
843* |
4,096 |
960,000 |
150 |
20,160 |
150 |
30,000 |
*Memory values will increase for 192 vCores at GA.
- Premium-series Hyperscale can now scale up to 160 vCores & 192 vCores in public preview regions.
- High performance CPUs optimized for compute-intensive workloads.
- Increased memory capacity proportional to vCore scale
- Up to 128 TiB of data storage, consistent with Hyperscale architecture
- Full compatibility with existing Hyperscale features and capabilities
Performance Improvements with 160 and 192 vcores
Strong scale-up efficiency observed beyond 128 vCores: Moving from 128 → 160 → 192 vCores shows consistent performance gains, demonstrating that Hyperscale Premium-series continues to scale effectively at higher core counts.
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Performance case study (Zava Lending example)
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Preview scope and limitations
During preview, Premium-series 160 and 192 vCores are supported in a limited set of initial regions (Australia East, Canada Central, East US 2, South Central US, UK South, West Europe, North Europe, Southeast Asia, West US 2), with broader availability planned over time.
During preview:
- Zone redundancy and Azure SQL Database maintenance window are not supported for these sizes
- Preview features are subject to supplemental preview terms, and performance characteristics may continue to improve through GA
Customers are encouraged to use this preview to validate scalability, concurrency, memory utilization, query parallelism, and readiness for larger single database deployments.
Next Steps
This public preview is part of our broader investment in scaling Azure SQL Hyperscale for the most demanding workloads. Feedback from preview will help inform GA configuration limits, regional rollout priorities, and performance optimizations at extreme scale.
Microsoft