New Da/Ea/Fav6 VMs with increased performance and Azure Boost are now generally available
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 overthe 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. Series vCPU Memory (GiB) Max Local NVMe Disk (GiB) Max IOPS for Local Disk Max Uncached Disk IOPS for Managed Disks Max Managed Disks Throughput (MBps) Dalsv6 2-96 4-192 N/A N/A 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Daldsv6 2-96 4-192 1x110 - 6x880 1.8M 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Dasv6 2-96 8-384 N/A N/A 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Dadsv6 2-96 8-384 1x110 - 6x880 1.8M 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 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. Series vCPU Memory (GiB) Max Local NVMe Disk (GiB) Max IOPS for Local Disk Max Uncached Disk IOPS for Managed Disks Max Managed Disks Throughput (MBps) Easv6 2-96 16-672 N/A N/A 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 Eadsv6 2-96 16-672 1x110 - 6x880 1.8M 4 - 172K 90 – 4,320 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. Series vCPU Memory (GiB) Max Uncached Disk IOPS for Managed Disks Max Managed Disks Throughput (MBps) Max Network Bandwidth (Gbps) Falsv6 2-64 4-128 4 - 115K 90 - 2,880 12.5 - 36 Fasv6 2-64 8-256 4 - 115K 90 - 2,880 12.5 - 36 Famsv6 2-64 16-512 4 - 115K 90 - 2,880 12.5 - 36 Customers are excited about new AMD v6 VMs FlashGridoffers 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 usingFlashGrid 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 WindowsandLinux. You can learn more about the new VMs in the documentation for Dal-series, Da-series, Ea-series, andFa-series. We also recommend reading theNVMe overview and FAQ. You can find theUltra diskandPremium SSD V2 regional availability to pair with the new NVMe based v6 series at their respective links.
Azure Windows Virtual Machine Activation: two new KMS IP addresses (…and why you should care)
This blog contains important information about KMS IP addresses changes thatmayimpact Windows Virtual machine activations for Azure Global Cloud customers who configured custom routes or firewall rules to allow KMS IP addresses. Who will be affected? In July 2022, we announced two new KMS IP addresses, 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53, in Azure Global Cloud via Azure Update - Generally available: New KMS DNS in Azure Global Cloud. We expect that most Azure Windows Virtual Machine customers will not be impacted. However, Azure Global Cloud customers who have followed troubleshooting guides, like the ones listed below, to configure custom routes or firewall rules that allow Windows VMs to reach KMS IP address in the past, must take actions to include these two new KMS IP addresses, 20.118.99.224 and 40.83.235.53. Otherwise, after October 3rd, 2022, your Windows Virtual Machines will report warnings of failing to reach Windows Licensing Servers for activation. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/custom-routes-enable-kms-activation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/troubleshoot-activation-problems https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/protect-azure-virtual-desktop How will customersbe affected? As explained in Generally available: New KMS DNS in Azure Global Cloud, most Windows Virtual Machines in Global Cloud rely on new azkms.core.windows.net for Windows Activation. The new azkms.core.windows.net is currently pointing to kms.core.windows.net. After October 3 rd , 2022, azkms.core.windows.net will point to two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53. For customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/custom-routes-enable-kms-activation, without taking the actions to include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53 in custom routes, your Windows Virtual Machines will not be able to connect to new KMS server for Windows Activation. For customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/protect-azure-virtual-desktop, without taking the actions to include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53 in firewall rules, your Windows Virtual Machines will not be able to connect to new KMS server for Windows Activation. When failing to connect to KMS server for activation, Azure Windows Virtual Machines report warnings like the following - “We can't activate Windows on this device as we can't connect to your organization's activation server. Make sure you're connected to your organization's network and try again. If you continue having problems with activation, contact your organization's support person. Error code: 0xC004F074.” As explained in Key Management Services (KMS) activation planning, “KMS activations are valid for 180 days, a period known as the activation validity interval. KMS clients must renew their activation by connecting to the KMS host at least once every 180 days to stay activated. By default, KMS client computers attempt to renew their activation every seven days. After a client's activation is renewed, the activation validity interval begins again”. Within the 180-day KMS activate validity interval, customers can still access the full functionality of the Windows virtual machine. Customers should fix activation issues during the 180-day KMS activation validity interval. Action required To customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/virtual-machines/custom-routes-enable-kms-activation, include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53 in custom routes before October 3 rd , 2022. To customers who follow https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/firewall/protect-azure-virtual-desktop, include these two new IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53 in firewall rules before October 3 rd , 2022. How to check You can remote login to your Windows Virtual Machines and complete the following: Open PowerShell. Run the following command to confirm the connectivity to new KMS IP addresses: test-netconnection azkms.core.windows.net-port 1688 test-netconnection 20.118.99.224-port 1688 test-netconnection 40.83.235.53 -port 1688 If the connections are successful, no more action is needed. If the connection(s) fails, you need to go to the “Action required” section. Important timeline After October 3 rd , 2022, most Azure Windows Virtual Machines will rely on two new KMS IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53 for Windows Activation, when azkms.core.windows.net points to these two new IP addresses. After March 1 st , 2023, all Azure Windows Virtual Machines will rely on two new KMS IP addresses 20.118.99.224and40.83.235.53 for Windows Activation, when kms.core.windows.net points to 20.118.99.224.Public Preview: Custom metrics for rolling upgrades on Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Today we are announcing the public preview of custom metrics for rolling upgrades on Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Custom metrics for rolling upgrades enables you to utilize theapplication health extensionto emit custom metrics to your Virtual Machine Scale Set. These custom metrics can be used to tell the scale set the order in which virtual machines should be updated when a rolling upgrade is triggered. Custom metrics can also inform your scale set when an upgrade should be skipped on a specific instance. Custom metrics can be used in combination with other rolling upgrade functionality such asautomatic OS upgrades,automatic extension upgradesandMaxSurge rolling upgrades. Key benefits More control over the order in which instances are upgraded. Skip upgrades on specific instances while ensuring the rest of the fleet is upgraded. Integrates with rolling upgrade policy, application health extension, automatic OS upgrades, and automatic extension upgrades. Phase ordering A phase is a grouping construct for virtual machines. Each phase is determined by setting metadata emitted from theapplication health extensionvia thecustomMetricsproperty. The Virtual Machine Scale Set takes the information retrieved from the custom metrics and uses it to place virtual machines into their assigned phases. Within each phase, the Virtual Machine Scale set will also assign upgrade batches. Each batch is configured using therolling upgrade policy which takes into consideration the update domains (UD), fault domains (FD), and zone information of each virtual machine. Skip upgrade Skip upgrade functionality enables an individual instance to be omitted from an upgrade during the rolling upgrade. This is similar to utilizing instance protection but can more seamlessly integrate into the rolling upgrade workflow and into instance level applications. Similar to phase ordering, the skip upgrade information is passed to the Virtual Machine Scale Set via the application health extension and custom metrics settings. When the rolling upgrade is triggered, the Virtual Machine Scale Set checks the response of the application health extensions custom metrics and if skip upgrade is set to true, the instance is not included in the rolling upgrade. Available Now Custom metrics for rolling upgrades is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about custom metrics for rolling upgrades on Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
General Availability Announcement: VMSS Zonal Expansion
The Azure VMSS Zonal Expansion feature is now generally available. This significant enhancement allows customers to transition their virtual machine scale sets from a regional to zonal resiliency strategy or add additional zones to a scale set. By distributing VMs across multiple zones, customers can significantly enhance their business continuity and resilience, achieving a higher availability Service Level Agreement (SLA) of 99.99% compared to the previous 99.95%. The Azure VMSS Zonal Expansion feature simplifies the migration process, enabling customers to update their scale set environment to the Azure recommended zone-redundant availability strategy without the need to delete and recreate instances or experience application downtime. This means that businesses can now take full advantage of the improved availability and reliability offered by Azure availability zones, ensuring their applications remain highly available and resilient to potential disruptions. For more information, visit https://aka.ms/vmss-zonal-expansionGeneral Availability: MaxSurge for Virtual Machine Scale Sets
Today we are announcing the general availability of MaxSurge upgrades for Virtual Machine Scale Sets. MaxSurge can help improve service uptime during upgrade events. Rolling upgrades with MaxSurge creates new instances with the latest scale set model to replace instances running with the old model. By creating new instances instead of upgrading instances in place, you can ensure that your scale set capacity doesn't drop below the set instance count during the duration of the upgrade process. Key Benefits Perform instance updates without reducing scale set capacity. Ensure newly created VMs are healthy prior to moving onto additional updates. Improve application uptime during upgrades. Configure rolling upgrades with MaxSurge Enabling or disabling MaxSurge can be done during or after scale set provisioning. Additionally, MaxSurge is directly associated with the rolling upgrade policy which enables you to configure settings such as batch size, pause time between batches, and prioritizing unhealthy instances first. Available Now Rolling upgrades with MaxSurge is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about MaxSurge rolling upgrades for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.General Availability: Standby Pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration
Today we are announcing the general availability of standby pools forVirtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration. Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets enables you to increase scaling performance by creating a pool of pre-provisioned virtual machines. The virtual machines in the standby pool complete all post provisioning processes such as installing applications, downloading data packages, etc. Once the virtual machines have been fully provisioned, they can be maintained in a running or a stopped (deallocated) state. Whenever a scale out event is triggered, the instances in the standby pool are automatically moved into the scale set. Key Benefits Significantly reduce the time it takes to scale out a Virtual Machine Scale Set. Complete all post provisioning steps in the standby pool. Maintain a pool of deallocated instances to reduce costs while still significantly reducing scale out latency. Works alongside your scale set to maintain the desired capacity. Create a standby pool Navigate to your Virtual Machine Scale Set. UnderAvailability + scaleselectStandby pool. SelectManage pool. Provide a name for your pool, provisioning state and maximum and minimum ready capacity. Select Save. You can also configure a standby pool during Virtual Machine Scale Set creation by navigating to the Management tab and checking the box to enable standby pools. Once the standby pool is created and the instances have successfully reached the desired power state, any scaling events triggered on the scale set will automatically use instances from the standby pool. If at any point in time more instances are requested than available in the standby pool, the scale set will default to creating new instances directly in the scale set. Available now Standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration is available in all public Azure regions. Learn more about standby pools for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.General Availability: Upgrade Policies on Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration
Today we are announcing the general availability of upgrade policies forVirtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration. Upgrade policies allow for more granular control over the upgrade process, ensuring that your services remain available and responsive during updates. Key Benefits Keep scale set instances up to date and secure without impacting availability Choose an upgrade policy that best fits your workload Change and modify your upgrade policy at any time Spend less time manually managing the upgrade process Automatic upgrade policy With an automatic upgrade policy, the scale set makes no guarantees about the order of virtual machines being brought down. The scale set might take down all virtual machines at the same time to perform upgrades. Automatic upgrade policy is best suited for DevTest scenarios where you aren't concerned about the uptime of your instances while making changes to configurations and settings. Manual upgrade policy With a manual upgrade policy, you choose when to update the scale set instances. Nothing happens automatically to the existing virtual machines when changes occur to the scale set model. New instances added to the scale set use the most update-to-date model available. Manual upgrade policy is best suited for workloads where you require more control over when and how instances are updated. Rolling upgrade policy With a rolling upgrade policy, the scale set performs updates in batches. You also get more control over the upgrades with settings like batch size, max healthy percentage, prioritizing unhealthy instances and enabling upgrades across availability zones. Additionally, Rolling has the option to enable MaxSurge. MaxSurge deploys new instances running the latest model to replace instances using the old model. MaxSurge allows customers to maintain their full scale set capacity during the upgrade process, ensuring the entirety of their scale set is available to receive traffic Rolling upgrade policy is best suited for production workloads that require a set number of instances always be available. Rolling upgrades is safest way to upgrade instances to the latest model without compromising availability and uptime. Setting the Upgrade Policy The upgrade policy can be set during scale set creation or change any time post creation. If you do not explicitly set an upgrade policy, it will default to manual. During the Virtual Machine Scale Set creation in the Azure portal, under theManagementtab, set the upgrade policy toRolling,Automatic, orManual. Alternatively, for existing Virtual Machine Scale Sets, select the Virtual Machine Scale Set you want to change the upgrade policy for. In the menu underSettings, selectUpgrade Policy and from the drop-down menu, select the upgrade policy you want to enable. If using a Rolling Upgrade Policy, you can configure additional settings such as batch size, max unhealthy percentage or opt to use MaxSurge which will help to ensure your application remains fully up and running during the upgrade process. Available Now Upgrade policies for Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible Orchestration are available in all public cloud regions. To get started, seeUpgrade Policies for Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
Upcoming Changes to Instance Size Flexibility Ratios for Reserved VM Instances for M-series
Overview In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud computing, it is crucial to stay informed about changes that may affect your usage and business. We are writing to notify you about some important updates related to Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instance (RI) for M-series. What is happening? As we continue to offer a wide selection of SKUs for M-series VMs, on December 6, we will be updating the instance size flexibility ratios for this product to optimize reservation discount within instance size flexibility groups and their respective SKUs. How do instance size flexibility ratios work? When you purchase a RI, you can choose to optimize for instance size flexibility or capacity priority. When you choose instance size flexibility, it allows the RI discount to apply to all VM sizes (SKUs) within that instance size flexibility group. The discount application varies based on the VM size selected when purchasing RIs, the sizes of VMs in use, and the ratio, which represents the relative footprint for each VM size within the instance size flexibility group. See an example of instance size flexibility group, SKUs included in that group and their ratios in the table below. Figure 1. Example of instance size flexibility group Why is this important? If you have reservations for M-series VMs, optimized for instance size flexibility, you may notice changes in your reservation coverage. Although there are no price changes, your reservation utilization could change due to the changes in ratios. Change in instance size flexibility ratios will impact the total units/VMs covered by RI, it will either increase or decrease RI coverage. Coverage for each VM SKU is measured by RI Normalization ratio, which is provided in the usage file under the additional info attribute, which can be downloaded from Cost Management (see more details on thisprocess here). If the RI Normalization ratio increases, the RI Coverage will decrease, resulting in overages/additional costs. If the ratio decreases, the RI will cover more VMs. What do I need to do? Prior to December 6, please review the list of SKUs with updated instance size flexibility ratios to understand if your VMs will be impacted. If you don’t have reservations for SKUs (VM sizes) listed in that list, these changes will not affect you. Starting December 6, start to review your RI utilization to understand how the updated ratios may have impacted your coverage. You can find step by step guidance on how to review your utilization in the Azure Portal leveraging this MS Learn Page. If your reservations are underutilized, you can run more VMs of that instance, exchange unused reservations to a VM family that is not covered by an RI or you could trade-in unused reservations to an Azure savings plan for compute to increase savings. You can also find additional guidance leveraging Azure Advisor to identify additional ways to save within your environment. If your reservations are 100% utilized, it is recommended to review your cost savings recommendations in Azure Advisor to identify additional ways to save within your environment such as purchasing additional RIs or savings plans. Please note that it can take up to a few days for Azure Advisor recommendations to update based on the updated ratios. If you want to learn more about how to manage your billing account and subscriptions, please visit theCost Management + Billing documentation. If you are having cost management or invoice related issues because of this change, please contact support. Additional Resources: Save with Azure reservations - Microsoft Cost Management | Microsoft Learn Prepay for Azure virtual machines to save money - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn Save money with Azure Reserved Instances - Training | Microsoft Learn Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances | Microsoft Azure Azure Advisor – Azure Best Practices | Microsoft Azure Microsoft Cost Management | Microsoft Azure How to optimize your Azure compute spend with savings plan and reserved instances - Microsoft Community Hub
