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Microsoft recently announced two additional Memory Optimized Virtual Machines (VM) sizes, E96bsv5 and E112ibsv5, to the Ebsv5 VM family developed with the NVMe protocol providing performance up to 260,000 IOPS and 8,000 MBps remote disk storage throughput.

Earlier, the company made Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 generally available, which offer up to 120,000 IOPS and 4,000MBps of remote disk storage throughput. With the addition of E96bsv5 and E112ibsv5 VM sizes in public preview, the company aims to allow customers to consolidate existing workloads into fewer or smaller VM sizes and achieve potential cost savings. 

Edsv5-series virtual machines run on the 3rd Generation Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor (in a hyper threaded configuration) and can reach an all-core turbo clock speed of up to 3.5 GHz. In addition, the new VM sizes in the series only have SSD premium support and can have up to 672 GiB of RAM and sizeable local SSD storage (up to 3,800 GiB).

With the new VMs sizes, Microsoft tries to stay ahead of its competitors, AWS and Google. AWS offers memory optimized compute instances, including the latest Amazon EC2 R7iz instances (powered by 4th Generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors). Similarly, Google offers memory-optimized machines with the M machine series.

Priya Shan, a Senior Program Manager, explains in a Tech community blog post the benefit of the new sizes:

While the Ev5 VMs meet the performance requirements for many business-critical applications, some large on-premises database environments require even higher VM-to-disk throughput and IOPS performance per core which the latest NVMe Ebsv5 VM sizes can now support. The NVMe-based Ebsv5 VMs offer customers the performance to scale without rearchitecting their applications while reducing the cost of infrastructure and licensed commercial software running on those instances.

In addition, Michael Roth, an Azure HPC Specialist at Microsoft, tweeted:

They use NVMe and provide exceptional remote storage performance offering up to 260K IOPS and 8K MBps throughput, great for #HPC use cases.

The E96bsv5 and E112ibsv5 VMs are currently available in the US West Central region, and more regions will follow. Additionally, customers can sign up for the preview to access the new sizes. Lastly, the pricing details are available on the pricing page.