Microsoft starts preview with Azure on Arm

Microsoft is previewing ARM processor-based virtual machines for its Azure cloud service. According to the company, the offering can offer better value for money than virtual machines based on x86 processors.

Microsoft makes for the preview of the Azure VMs based on Arm use of Altra processors from Ampere Computing. The company focuses on use for web servers, application servers, databases and gaming and media servers, among other things. The Azure Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 VMs are for all kinds of applications; the Epsv5 is mainly aimed at workloads that require a lot of memory, such as data analysis and caching.

The virtual machines provide up to 64 virtual CPUs and memory amounts of up to 2GiB, 4GiB and 8GiB per virtual CPU configuration. Supplementing with local SSD storage is optional. In terms of operating system, there is a choice of Ubuntu 20.04 and CentOS 7.9.

According to Microsoft, the Altra processors work at a maximum of 3GHz. The company will probably use the Altra Max CPUs. These have up to 128 Armv8.2 cores based on 64bit. The chips include 1MB L2 cache per core and 128 PCIe 4.0 lanes.

The claim is that the price-performance ratio of the offering can be up to 50 percent higher than VMs with x86 processors. Evan Burness of Microsoft’s Azure division clarifies that the comparison involves x86 processors with multithreading enabled. If customers turn this off, the price-performance advantage of the Arm offering would be reduced or lost.