Microsoft takes the wraps off its Arm-based Azure VMs

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By Will McCurdy
published

Azure users now have a viable alternative to x86 processor-based VMs

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Microsoft is set to launch Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) featuring the Ampere Altra Arm-based processor. 

Ampere is an American fabless semiconductor company based in Santa Clara, California, which launched in 2018 in a bid to take a bite out of the data center hardware market which had up until that point been dominated by Intel and AMD. 

Though hardware from UK-based Arm has long been omnipresent in the smartphone and consumer electronics space, x86 processors such as those provided by Intel and AMD have generally held sway in the cloud computing market.

What can these machines do?

The new Azure Arm-based virtual machines available include the Dpsv5 series, which offers up to 64 vCPUs and 4GBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GBs.

In addition, customers will also be able to access the Dplsv5 series, which offers up to 64 vCPUs and 2GBs of memory per vCPU up to 128 GBs, and the Epsv5 series, which offers up to 32 vCPUs and 8GBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GBs.

All the new virtual machine sizes will support up to 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth and support attached standard SSDs, standard HDDs, premium SSDs, and ultra disk storage.

The Dpdv5, Dpldv5, and Epdv5 virtual machine series also include fast local-SSD storage according to Microsoft.

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But it's not just Microsoft that is looking to incorporate Arm-based VMs into their lineups.

The new Arm-based Tau T2A chips will join Google's existing line of Tau VMs, which were launched in June 2021.

Google says the new chips will be appropriate for scale-out workloads including web servers, containerized microservices, data-logging processing, media transcoding, and Java applications.

The new virtual machines will be generally available on September 1, and customers can already launch them in 10 Azure regions and in multiple availability zones around the world.

Prices will vary by region, and if you can't wait to get started, head here to start on Azure Arm-based Virtual Machines and AKS containers immediately.

  • Interested in running VMs? Checkout our guide to best cloud hosting
Will McCurdy

Will McCurdy has been writing about technology for over five years. He has a wide range of specialities including cybersecurity, fintech, cryptocurrencies, blockchain, cloud computing, payments, artificial intelligence, retail technology, and venture capital investment. He has previously written for AltFi, FStech, Retail Systems, and National Technology News and is an experienced podcast and webinar host, as well as an avid long-form feature writer.