We are pleased to announce the public preview of the latest versions of the CPU burstable B family of Azure Virtual Machines. The new additions to the B family consist of 3 new VM series - Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2, each based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C, AMD EPYC™ 7763v, and Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors respectively. These new burstable v2-series virtual machines offer up to 15% better price-performance, up to 5X higher network bandwidth with accelerated networking, and 10X higher remote storage throughput when compared to the original B series.
These new CPU burstable VM series are designed to provide customers with the latest generation compute, storage, and networking performance at the lowest cost in the Azure Virtual Machines portfolio.
Burstable virtual machines utilize a CPU credit model to track how much CPU utilization is consumed. The VMs accumulate CPU credits when a workload is operating below the baseline CPU utilization threshold, and uses credits when running above the baseline utilization threshold until all credits are consumed. Upon consuming all the CPU credits, CPU utilization is limited to its baseline CPU utilization % until it accumulates the credits to burst to a higher CPU utilization again.
Burstable virtual machines offer a balance of compute, memory, and network resources and are a cost-effective way to run a broad spectrum of general-purpose workloads, including large-scale micro-services, small and medium databases, virtual desktops, business-critical applications, and are also an affordable option to run your code repositories and dev/test environments when sporadic bursts of CPU usage is needed.
The Bsv2-series and Basv2-series offer virtual machines with up to 32 vCPUs and 128 GiB of RAM, and the Bpsv2-series offers sizes with up to 16 vCPU and 64 GiB of RAM. These sizes are equipped with accelerated networking enabling max network bandwidth up to 6250 Mbps and max uncached disk throughput up to 600 Mbps. Burstable v2-series VMs also support attaching remote Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD, and Premium SSD v2 disk types. You can also attach Ultra Disk storage based on its regional availability.
Our new burstable VMs provide exceptional improvements in performance, flexibility, and cost, and are a great way to begin your Azure journey. Consider the new burstable v2-series VMs if you have compute workloads that do not require consistent CPU utilization and/or are using older-generation VMs in Azure. You may be able to lower your total costs and boost performance with a simple migration to one of these new VMs.
To learn more about burstable v2-series VMs and where it’s available, you can read our documentation for Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 and visit our product availability page.
