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.

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.

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.

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.