We are excited to announce the general availability of our new Dv3 VM sizes. We are also changing the naming for the high memory D sizes (D11-D14) to become the Ev3 family. These new sizes introduce Hyper-Threading Technology running on the Intel® Broadwell E5-2673 v4 2.3GHz processor, and the Intel® Haswell 2.4 GHz E5-2673 v3. The shift from physical cores to virtual CPU’s (vCPU) is a key architectural change that enables us to unlock the full potential of the latest processors to support even larger VM sizes. By unlocking more power from the underlying hardware, we are able to harness better performance and efficiency, resulting in cost savings that we are passing on to our customers. These new Hyper-Threaded sizes will be priced up to 28% lower than the previous Dv2 sizes.
The Dv3 and Ev3 sizes are also some of the first VM’s to be running on Windows Server 2016 hosts. Windows 2016 hosts enable Nested Virtualization and Hyper-V Containers for these new VM sizes. Nested virtualization allows you to run a Hyper-V server on an Azure virtual machine. With nested virtualization you can run a Hyper-V Container in a virtualized container host, set-up a Hyper-V lab in a virtualized environment, or to test multi-machine scenarios. You can find more information on Nested Virtualization on Azure.
Read about it on the Azure blog.