Azure virtual machines are one of several types of on-demand, scalable computing resources that Azure offers. An Azure virtual machine gives you the flexibility of virtualization without having to buy and maintain the physical hardware that runs it.
Virtual Machines (VMs) in Azure come in predefined sizes that are called families or series. The term "instance" is frequently used to describe a single VM. According to Microsoft Azure, their selection of virtual machines (VMs) can be used for virtually any application. The distinction between the various Microsoft Azure instance types are based on different factors like memory, storage, and computing power.
In this article, lets discuss more about differnet types of Azure VM's.
1. A Series - Entry-level VMs for dev/test
A-series VMs have CPU performance and memory configurations best suited for entry level workloads like development and test, code repositories etc... They are economical and provide a low-cost option to get started with Azure. As per Microsoft, Basic and Standard A-series VMs will retire on 31st August 2024.
Examples of workloads include servers for proof-of-concepts, code repositories, small to medium databases, low traffic web servers, and development and test servers.
2. B Series - Economical burstable VMs
Bs-series VMs are economical virtual machines that provide a low-cost option for workloads that typically run at a low to moderate baseline CPU utilization, but sometimes need to burst to significantly higher CPU utilization when the demand rises. Bs-series VMs are not hyperthreaded.
Servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers, development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small databases, and micro services are a few examples of workloads.
3. D Series - General purpose compute
The D-series Azure VMs offer a combination of vCPUs, memory, and temporary storage able to meet the requirements associated with most production workloads.
Numerous enterprise-grade applications, e-commerce systems, web front ends, desktop virtualization solutions, customer relationship management software, entry-level and mid-range databases, application servers, gaming servers, media servers, and other workloads are examples of workloads.
4. E Series - Optimized for in-memory applications
The E-series Azure VMs are optimised for heavy in-memory applications such as SAP HANA. These VMs are configured with high memory-to-core ratios, which makes them well-suited for memory-intensive enterprise applications, large relational database servers, in-memory analytics workloads etc.
Example use cases include SAP HANA, SAP S/4 HANA, SQL Hekaton and other large in-memory business critical workloads.
5. F-Series - Compute optimized virtual machines
F-series VMs feature a higher CPU-to-memory ratio. They are equipped with 2 GB RAM and 16 GB of local solid state drive (SSD) per CPU core and are optimised for compute intensive workloads.
Example workloads include batch processing, web servers, analytics and gaming.
6. G-Series - Memory and storage optimized virtual machines
G-series VMs feature the Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family, two times more memory and four times more Solid State Drive storage (SSDs) than the General Purpose D-series. G-series features up to ½ TB of RAM and 32 CPU cores and provide unparalleled computational performance, memory and local SSD storage for your most demanding applications.
Example workloads include large SQL and NoSQL databases, ERP, SAP and data warehousing solutions.
7. H-Series - High Performance Computing virtual machines
The HB-series VMs are optimized for HPC applications, such as financial analysis, weather simulation and silicon RTL modelling. HB VMs feature up to 120 AMD EPY 7003-series CPU cores, 448 GB of RAM and no hyperthreading. HB-series VMs also provide 350 GB/sec of memory bandwidth, up to 32 MB of L3 cache per core, up to 7 GB/s of block device SSD performance and clock frequencies up to 3.675 GHz.
Example workloads include fluid dynamics, finite element analysis, seismic processing, reservoir simulation, risk analysis, electronic design automation, rendering, Spark, weather modelling, quantum simulation, computational chemistry, heat transfer simulation.
8. L-Series - Storage optimized virtual machines
The Ls-series VMs are storage optimized, and are ideal for applications requiring low latency, high throughput, and large local disk storage. These VMs are built on Intel Haswell processor technology, specifically E5 Xeon v3 processors with 4, 8, 16, and 32 core VM sizes. Ls-series VMs support up to 6 TB of local SSD and offer unmatched storage I/O performance.
Example workloads include NoSQL databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis. Data warehousing applications and large transactional databases are great use cases as well.
9. M-Series - Memory optimized virtual machines
The M-series family of Azure virtual machines are memory optimized and are ideal for heavy in-memory workloads such as SAP HANA. The M-Series offer up to 4 TB of RAM on a single VM. In addition, these VMs offer a virtual CPU count of up to 128 vCPUs on a single VM to enable high performance parallel processing.
Example workloads include SAP HANA, SAP S/4 HANA, SQL Hekaton and other large in-memory business critical workloads requiring massive parallel compute power.
10. Mv2-Series - Largest memory optimized virtual machines
The Azure Mv2-series virtual machines are hyper-threaded and feature Intel Xeon Platinum 8180M 2.5GHz (Skylake) processors, offering up to 416 vCPU on a single VM and offer 3TB, 6 TB and 12 TB memory configurations. This is by far the largest-memory virtual machine offered on Azure and provide unparalleled computational performance to support large in-memory databases.
Example workloads include SAP HANA, SAP S/4 HANA, SQL Hekaton and other large in-memory business critical workloads requiring massive parallel compute power.
11. N-Series - GPU enabled virtual machines
The N-series is a family of Azure Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities. GPUs are ideal for compute and graphics-intensive workloads, helping customers to fuel innovation through scenarios like high-end remote visualization, deep learning, and predictive analytics.
The N-series has three different offerings aimed at specific workloads:
- The NC-series is focused on high-performance computing and machine learning workloads. The latest version—NCv3—features NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 GPU.
- The ND-series is focused on training and inference scenarios for deep learning. It uses the NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs. The latest version – NDv2 – features the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs.
- The NV-series enables powerful remote visualization workloads and other graphics-intensive applications backed by the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU.
Example workloads include simulation, deep learning, graphics rendering, video editing, gaming and remote visualization.
See this, to know more about the sizes for Azure VM's.
With this I'll conclude this post here.
Thank you for reading!
*** Explore | Share | Grow ***
Comments