Announcing General Availability of Azure Dl/D/E v6 VMs powered by Intel EMR processor & Azure Boost
Today we are excited to announce General Availability of the new Azure General Purpose and Memory Optimized Virtual Machines powered by the 5 th Gen Intel® Xeon® processor (code-named Emerald Rapids). The new virtual machines are available in three different memory-to-core ratios and offer the option of with or without local NVMe SSD. The General Purpose families include Dlsv6, Dldsv6, Dsv6, and Ddsv6-series. The Memory Optimized families include Esv6 and Edsv6-series.Azure Automated Virtual Machine Recovery: Minimizing Downtime
Co-authors: Mukhtar Ahmed, Shekhar Agrawal, Harish Luckshetty, Vinay Nagarajan, Jie Su, Sri Harsha Kanukuntla, David Maldonado, Shardul Dabholkar. Keeping virtual machines running smoothly is essential for businesses across every industry. When a VM stays down for even a short period, the impact can cascade quickly; delayed financial transactions, stalled manufacturing lines, unavailable retail systems, or interruptions to healthcare services. This understanding led to the creation of this solution, with its primary goal of ensuring fast and reliable recovery times so customers can focus on their business priorities without worrying about manual recovery strategies. This feature helps ensure your business Service-Level Agreements are consistently met. When a VM experiences an issue, our system springs into action within seconds, working to restore your service as quickly as possible. It automatically executes the optimal recovery strategy, all without customer intervention. The feature operates continuously in the background, monitoring the health of VMs through multiple detection mechanisms. Lastly, it automatically selects the fastest recovery path based on the specific failure type. Getting Started The best part? Azure Automated VM Recovery requires no setup or configuration. Running quietly in the background, this service helps guarantee the highest level of recoverability and a smooth experience for every Azure customer. Your VMs are already benefiting from faster detection, smarter diagnosis, and optimized recovery strategies. The Importance of Automated VM Recovery Automated VM recovery is essential to keeping cloud services resilient, reliable, and interruption-free. Automated recovery ensures that the moment a failure occurs, the platform responds instantly with fast detection, intelligent diagnostics, and the optimal repair action, all without requiring customer intervention. Better experience for customers: By minimizing VM downtime, it helps customers keep their services online, avoiding disruptions and potential business losses. Stronger trust in Azure: Fast, reliable recovery builds customer confidence in Azure’s platform, reinforcing our reputation for dependability. Reduced financial impact for customers: The lower the downtime, the less time your customers will be impacted, reducing potential loss of revenue and minimizing business disruption during critical operations. Empowering internal teams: Automated monitoring and clear visibility into recovery metrics help teams track health, onboard easily, and identify opportunities for improvement with minimal effort. How Azure Automated VM Recovery Works: A Three-Stage Approach Azure automatically handles VM issues through a three-stage recovery framework: Detection, Diagnosis, and Mitigation. Detection From the moment a failure occurs, multiple parallel mechanisms identify issues quickly. Azure hardware devices send regular health signals, which are monitored for interruptions or degradation. At the application level, operational health is tracked via response times, error rates, and successful operations to detect software-level problems rapidly. Diagnosis Once detected, lightweight diagnostics determine the best recovery action without unnecessary delays. Diagnostics operates at multiple levels; host level checks asses underlying infrastructure, VM level diagnostics evaluate the virtual machine state and system-on-chip (SoC) level analysis examines hardware components. This includes network checks, resource utilization assessments, and service responsiveness tests. Detailed data is also collected for post-incident analysis, continuously improving diagnostic algorithms while active recovery proceeds. Mitigation Based on diagnostics, the system automatically executes the optimal recovery strategy, starting with the least disruptive methods and escalating as needed. Hardware failures may trigger VM migration, while software issues might be resolved with targeted service restarts. If needed, a host reset is performed while preserving virtual machine state, ensuring minimal disruption to running workloads. Post-mitigation health checks ensure full VM functionality before recovery is considered complete. Recovery Event Annotations Recovery Event Annotations are specialized annotations that provide detailed visibility into every stage of VM recovery, going beyond simple uptime metrics. These indicators act as custom monitoring metrics, breaking down each incident into precise time segments. For example, TTD (Time to Detect) measures the time between a VM becoming unhealthy and the system recognizing the issue, while TTDiag (Time to Diagnose) tracks the duration of diagnostic checks. By analyzing these segments, Recovery Timing Indicators help identify bottlenecks, optimize recovery steps, and improve overall reliability. Key benefits include: Understanding why some VMs recover faster than others. Identifying which diagnostics add value versus those that don’t. Highlighting opportunities that provide a faster path of recovery. Enabling early detection of regressions through event annotation-driven alerts. Establishing a common language across Azure teams for measuring and improving downtime. Customer Impact and Results Azure Automated VM Recovery demonstrates our commitment to not only high availability but also rapid recovery. By minimizing downtime, it helps customers build resilient applications and maintain business continuity during unexpected failures. Over the past 18 months, this solution has cut average VM downtime by more than half, significantly enhancing reliability and customer experience. Our ongoing goal is to provide a platform where customers can deploy workloads with confidence, knowing automated recovery will minimize disruptions.
Revolutionizing Reliability: Introducing the Azure Failure Prediction and Detection (AFPD) system
As part of the journey to consistently improve Azure reliability and platform stability, we launched Azure Failure Prediction & Detection (AFPD), Azure’s premiere shift-left reliability solution. AFPD became operational in 2024, unifying failure prediction, detection, mitigation, and remediation services into a single end-to-end system with the goal of preventing Azure Compute customer workload interruptions and repairing nodes at scale. AFPD builds upon previous reliability solutions such as Project Narya, adding new best practices and fleet health management capabilities on top of pre-existing failure prediction and mitigation capabilities. The end-to-end AFPD system has proven to further reduce the overall number of reboots by over 36% and allows for a proactive approach to maintaining the cloud. This system operates for all Azure Compute General Purpose, Specialized Compute, High Performance Computing (HPC)/Artificial Intelligence (AI) workloads and select Azure Storage scenarios. For a deeper dive, you can read the whitepaper here, which won Best Paper Award at the 2025 IEEE Cloud Summit!
Azure delivers the first cloud VM with Intel Xeon 6 and CXL memory - now in Private Preview
Intel released their new Intel Xeon 6 6500/6700 series processor with P-cores this year. Intel Xeon 6 processors provide performance and scalability by delivering outstanding performance for transactional and analytical workloads and provide scale-up capacities of up to 64TB of memory. In addition, Intel Xeon 6 supports the new Compute Express Link (CXL) standard that enables memory expansion to accommodate larger data sets in a cost-effective manner. CXL Flat Memory Mode is a unique Intel Xeon 6 capability that enhances the ability to right-size the compute-to-memory ratio and improve scalability without sacrificing performance. This enhanced ability can help run SAP S/4HANA more efficiently and help enable greater flexibility for configurations so they can better align with business needs and improve the total cost of ownership. In collaboration with SAP and Intel, Microsoft is delighted to announce private preview of CXL technology on Azure M-series family of VMs. We believe that, when combined with advancements in the new Intel Xeon 6 processors, it can tackle the challenges of managing the growing volume of data in SAP software, meet the increased demand for faster compute performance and reduce overall TCO. Stefan Bäuerle, SVP, Head of BTP, HANA & Persistency at SAP noted: “Intel Xeon 6 helps deliver system scalability to support the growing demand for high-performance computing and growing database capacity among SAP customers.” Elyse Ge Hylander, Senior Director, Azure SAP Compute stated: “At Microsoft, we are continually exploring new technological innovations to improve our customer experience. We are thrilled about the potential of Intel’s new Xeon 6 processors with CXL and Flat Memory Mode. This is a big step forward to deliver the next-level performance, reliability, and scalability to meet the growing demands of our customers.” Bill Pearson, Vice President of Data Center and Artificial Intelligence at Intel states: “Intel Xeon 6 represents a significant advancement for Intel, opening up exciting business opportunities to strengthen our collaboration with Microsoft Azure and SAP. The innovative instance architecture featuring CXL Flat Memory Mode is designed to enhance cost efficiency and performance optimization for SAP software and SAP customers.” If you are interested in joining our CXL private preview in Azure, contact Mseries_CXL_Preview@microsoft.com ### Co-author: Phyllis Ng - Senior Director of Hardware Strategic Planning (Memory and Storage) - MicrosoftNVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs offering 400K IOPS and 10GBps throughput now generally available
In September 2023, we announced the Public Preview of NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 VMs offering 400K IOPS and 10GBps throughput Virtual Machine (VM) sizes based on the 3rd Gen Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C processor offering higher remote storage performance with Azure Disks. The Ebsv5 VM family is designed for memory-intensive business-critical applications, relational database servers, and in-memory data analytics workloads. Today, we are announcing the general availability (GA) of accelerated remote storage performance using Azure Premium SSD v2 and Ultra disk within the existing NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 family. The higher storage performance is offered across all Ebsv5 sizes and delivers up to 400K IOPS (I/O operations per second) and 10GBps of remote disk storage throughput. This general availability of accelerated NVMe-Ebsv5 with increased remote storage performance is part of the Azure Boost family which upgrades the fleet with these new capabilities. The NVMe enabled Ebsv5 sizes offer up to 2x the performance of SCSI VM sizes with no additional cost, providing better price-performance. The VM pricing details are available here. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 NVMe VM series In today's competitive business landscape, quickly processing, analyzing, and extracting insights from large volumes of data is essential. OLTP and OLAP applications, which handle real-time transactions, further highlight the need for powerful computing and storage solutions. Companies must adopt robust systems to manage increasing data demands efficiently while keeping costs in check. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM family with NVMe, made generally available in May 2023, meets the performance requirements for many business-critical applications. However, some workloads require even higher VM-to-disk throughput and IOPS performance over Ultra or Premium SSD v2 disk options, which are now served by the accelerated NVMe Ebsv5 VM sizes. Ebsv5 series NVMe VM specifications The E2-112i vCPU sizes with the NVMe provide higher performance than the comparable Ebsv5 SCSI sizes for the same price. The accelerated NVMe-enabled sizes offer up to 400,000 IOPS and 10,000 MBps with Ultra disk and Premium V2 storage offerings. Note the Uncached IOPS/ throughput specs are the same as Ebdsv5 VMs Size vCPU Memory GiB Max uncached disk throughput IOPS/MBps (Ultra/Pv2-SSD) Max burst uncached disk throughput IOPS/MBps (Ultra/Pv2-SSD) Standard_E2bs_v5 2 16 12000/300 15000/1200 Standard_E4bs_v5 4 32 21400/600 30000/1200 Standard_E8bs_v5 8 64 44200/1200 60000/1200 Standard_E16bs_v5 16 128 88400/2300 96000/2600 Standard_E32bs_v5 32 256 174200/4800 180000/5200 Standard_E48bs_v5 48 384 253300/7300 260000/7850 Standard_E64bs_v5 64 512 294800/7800 310000/8500 Standard_E96bs_v5 96 672 390000/8500 390000/9000 Standard_E112ibs_v5 112i 672 400000/10000 400000/10000 For more information, system prerequisite, current restrictions of this offering, please visit Ebsv5/Ebdsv5 specification page. *Please note that you are required to create new Ultra disks for Ebsv5 NVMe for the upgraded performance in the following regions: uswestcentral-AZ01, usstagesc-AZ01, ussouth-AZ02, useast, uscentral-AZ03,uksouth, europewest, europenorth, brazilsouth-AZ03, australiasoutheast-AZ01, asiasoutheast, australiaeast-AZ02,AZ03 All the rest of the regions that aren't listed here doesn't require new Ultra disks creation for upgraded performance Customer Testimonials: We had the opportunity to collaborate with several Azure partners during the preview period. Below is the feedback from some of the partners on the performance of the new VMs: FlashGrid.io offers solutions to help organizations simplify the management and deployment of their mission-critical databases in the cloud while ensuring high availability, scalability, and performance. “With the recent update of the Ebsv5 NVMe VMs we are now measuring 10 GBPS of throughput and 400K IOPS per VM with Premium SSD v2 disks. That is 30 GBPS and over 1M IOPS in a FlashGrid Cluster with three Oracle RAC database nodes, which is an order of magnitude higher than a typical on-premises storage system” Getting started Learn more about the NVMe Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VMs by reading the FAQ. Learn more about the Azure Boost by reading the aka.ms/azureboost .For pricing information, check out Windows and Linux. Also, please verify the Ultra disk and Premium SSD V2 regional availability to pair with the NVMe-enabled Ebsv5 series. Finally, if you need help selecting the best VM for your workload, start with the virtual machine selector.
