Microsoft says its new Azure Virtual Machines with Ampere Altra Arm-based processors are now generally available, allowing customers to launch them in 10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world.
The company earlier this year launched the preview of new general purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and memory optimized Epsv5 Azure Virtual Machine series-— built on the Ampere Altra processor—that are designed to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads.
“Since then, hundreds of customers have tested and experienced firsthand the excellent price-performance that the Arm architecture can provide for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and .NET applications, gaming, media servers and more,” writes Paul Nash, vice president of Azure Compute Platform, in a blog.
Starting now, all Azure customers can deploy the new virtual machines using the Azure portal, SDKs, API, PowerShell and the command-line interface.
As customers are building and running workloads on Azure designed to transform and modernize their business, they also want to maximize operational efficiency and take a holistic approach across their application portfolios, Nash says.
“They are also beginning to evaluate sustainability factors and the overall impact of their technological choices,” Nash writes. “Azure’s Ampere Altra Arm–based virtual machines represent a cost-effective and power-efficient option that does not compromise the level of performance that customers require.”
The company says it is collaborating with software and hardware companies—such as Ampere and Arm—to accelerate customer innovation and help customers build solutions and deploy workloads more easily and run them with high performance.
In addition, Microsoft is working with the open-source community and independent software vendors to make several Linux OS distributions—including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian—available on the new Arm-based Azure Virtual Machines.
Microsoft will also add support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux in the future, Nash writes.
Microsoft is also adding support for the new virtual machines in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) from the start, and the company is actively deploying updates across the Azure fleet to make AKS support for Arm nodes generally available within the next two weeks.
According to Microsoft, the Azure Arm-based virtual machine families include:
- Dpsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 4GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs,
- Dplsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 2GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 128 GiBs, and
- Epsv5 series, with up to 32 vCPUs and 8GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs.
According to Microsoft, the new virtual machine sizes support up to 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth; Standard SSDs, Standard HDDs, Premium SSDs, and Ultra Disk Storage can be attached to the virtual machines Dpdv5, Dpldv5, and Epdv5 virtual machine series also include fast local-SSD storage. Virtual Machine Scale Sets are also supported.
Organizations can monitor virtual machines and protect their data with Azure Monitor and Azure Backup and collect key metrics to track the performance of their resources using the Azure Monitor agent. IT professionals can correlate infrastructure issues for Arm-based virtual machines with VM insights, and for Arm-based Kubernetes clusters with container insights. Both VM insights and container insights for Arm-based offerings are in preview.
The Ampere Altra Arm–based Azure virtual machines are now available in the U.S. (West U.S. 2, West Central U.S., Central U.S., East U.S., East U.S. 2), Europe (West Europe, North Europe), Asia (East Asia, Southeast Asia), and Australia (Australia East) Azure regions. The company plans to expand Azure regional availability after September 1.
Spot Virtual Machines are also available today. Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances pricing will be offered when the Virtual Machines become generally available on September 1.
Read Microsoft’s Azure blog to learn more.
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