Increase remote storage performance with Azure Ebsv5 VMs—now generally available

At Microsoft Ignite in November 2021, we announced the memory-optimized Ev5 Azure Virtual Machine (VM) series based on the 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C processor. The Ev5 VMs are designed for memory-intensive business-critical applications, relational database servers, and in-memory data analytics workloads.

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the Ebsv5 VM series, a new addition to the Ev5 Azure VM family. The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VMs offer up to 120,000 IOPS and 4,000MBps of remote disk storage throughput. They also include up to 512 GiB of RAM and local SSD storage (maximum 2,400 GiB). This new VM series provides up to three times an increase in remote storage performance compared to previous VM generations and helps consolidate existing workloads on fewer VMs or smaller VM sizes to achieve potential cost savings. Additionally, the Ebdsv5 series features a local disk, and Ebsv5 is without a local disk to best match your workload requirements. To checkout regional availability, please visit Microsoft Azure Products by Region.

The Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VM series

As customers transition their business-critical applications to the cloud, questions arise on how to strike a balance among the various requirements such as availability, business continuity, resilience, performance, cost, and complexity, to name a few. To offer the best-in-class service to customers, Microsoft partners with technology vendors such as Intel to embed their latest innovations within Azure IaaS. With this strong collaboration, Azure delivers continuous infrastructure efficiency and performance improvements that customers expect from the cloud.

For instance, customers usually deploy large database workloads such as online transaction processing systems, data warehousing applications, and analytical applications on memory-optimized Ev5 VM series. While the Ev5 VMs meet the performance requirements for many business-critical applications, some workloads demand even higher VM-to-disk throughput and input/output operations per second (IOPS) performance, now offered by the Ebsv5 VM series. Workloads requiring higher throughput and IOPS can now migrate from the previous generation Ev4 VM series or constrained core vCPU capable Azure VMs to the Ebsv5 VMs to reduce the cost on both infrastructures and licensed commercial software running on those instances.

Ebsv5 series VM specifications:

Ebdsv5 series VM specifications:

Note the Uncached IOPS/ throughput specs are the same as Ebsv5 VMs

Customer testimonials

We had the opportunity to collaborate with various Azure customers during the preview period. Companies like SAS, Blue Yonder, and Silk tested the performance of the new VMs:

SAS is a leader in analytics. Through innovative software and services, SAS empowers and inspires customers around the world to transform data into intelligence.

“Microsoft has introduced the Ebdsv5 Azure Virtual Machines series for applications that require high IO throughput to process large volumes of data. We run several computationally and IO intensive tests to measure concurrent, mixed analytics workload performance. The Ebdsv5 VMs can offer increased IO throughput to external storage, and excellent overall performance to meet our SAS applications requirements. We are excited to start using the Ebdsv5 VMs to run SAS data and analytics solutions on Azure.“—Bryan Harris, Executive VP and CTO, SAS

Blue Yonder provides supply chain management, manufacturing planning, retail planning, store operations, and category management offerings.

“At Blue Yonder we have successfully transitioned our applications to a Software as a Service deployment model on Azure. We are continuously improving the scalability and cost of our offerings. That is also why we were thrilled to participate in the preview of the new Ebdsv5 Azure VMs. These new VM-series provide us with optimal sizes for our workloads and are able to meet high IO-throughput requirements with strong CPU performance and large memory footprints at a cost-effective price. The new Ebdsv5 Azure VMs will allow us to run solutions up to 20 percent faster, run larger workloads, while also reducing the overall total cost of ownership.”—Jan Karstens, CVP SaaS, Evangelist, Blue Yonder

The Silk Platform allows customers to scale their larger database storage solution to deliver increased performance.

“Silk has validated the Ebsv5 Azure VM series for use in the Silk Cloud Platform to run Mission Critical database workloads. The fantastic performance of these VMs makes them ideal for applications that need to process large volumes of data. We have seen over 10GBytes/sec sustained throughput to a single Ebsv5 series VM, from the Silk Cloud Platform, with SQL Server database workloads. The Silk Cloud Platform aggregates the egress performance from multiple VMs to enable maximum ingress performance to a database VM. We are excited to onboard the new Ebsv5 VMs when they become generally available.”—Tom O’Neill, CTO, Silk

Getting started

You can learn more about the Ebsv5 and Ebdsv5 VMs by registering for the upcoming webinar and reading the documentation. You can also check out pricing for Windows and Linux.

If you need help selecting the best VM for your workload, try using the virtual machine selector.