Microsoft announced the preview of Azure Virtual Machines featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor designed to help organizations manage complexity and run modern, dynamic and scalable applications.
According to Microsoft, these new VMS are designed to efficiently run scale-out workloads, web servers, application servers, open-source databases, cloud-native as well as rich .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers and more.
The VMs include general-purpose Dpsv5 and memory-optimized Epsv5 VMs, which Microsoft says can deliver up to 50 percent better price-performance than comparable x86-based VMs.
“The new Azure Virtual Machines, featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor, further extend our portfolio of compute solutions to help customers manage complexity and seamlessly run modern, dynamic, and scalable applications. Azure customers will benefit from the improvements the new VMs provide in terms of scalability, performance and operational efficiency,” Microsoft says in a blog.
Both the Dpsv5 and Epsv5 VMs feature the Altra Arm-based processor from Ampere, which operates at up to 3.0GHz. They provide up to 64 vCPUs and include VM sizes with 2GiB, 4GiB, and 8GiB per vCPU memory configurations, up to 40 Gbps networking and optional high-performance local SSD storage, according to Microsoft.
The VMs support Canonical Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, and Windows 11 Professional and Enterprise Edition on Arm. Support for additional operating systems including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Debian, AlmaLinux and Flatcar is coming soon.
Microsoft says the Dpsv5 VM-series are engineered to run several Linux enterprise workloads such as web servers, application servers, open-source databases, .NET applications, Java applications, gaming servers, media servers and more.
Meanwhile, the Dpldsv5 VM-series, which provide 2GiBs per vCPU and offer a combination of vCPUs, memory, and local storage able to cost-effectively run workloads that do not require larger amounts of RAM per vCPU, the company says.
According to Microsoft, the new Epsv5 VM sizes can meet the requirements associated with memory-intensive Linux-based workloads including open-source databases, in-memory caching applications, gaming and data analytics engines.
According to Ampere, the company’s Altra VMs outperform equivalently sized Intel and AMD instances from the same generation by 39% and 47%, respectively.
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