Microsoft has announced several enhancements for Azure Virtual Machines at their Microsoft Ignite Conference held last November. Here is a quick rundown of the changes to expect.

Azure Generation 2 Virtual Machines general availability

Improved features compared to generation 1 VMs

  • Increased Memory
  • Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX)
  • Virtualized Persistent Memory (vPMEM)
  • Uses the new UEFI-based boot architecture

More Info

Virtual Machine scale sets enhancement

  • Customers will now be able to create an empty virtual machine scale set and add various virtual machines belonging to different series
  • Provision VMs with custom images using a shared image gallery
  • New scale-in policy that lets customers determine the order in which VMs should be scaled in, or deprovisioned
  • New termination notifications with up to 15 minutes buffer before VMs are deprovisioned

Advanced security for SQL Server hosted on an Azure Virtual Machine

It supports the following features

  • Vulnerability assessment. A database scanning service that can discover, track, and help you remediate potential database vulnerabilities
  • Advanced threat protection. A detection service that continuously monitors your database for suspicious activities and provides action-oriented security alerts on anomalous database access patterns.

In addition, Microsoft also announced new Virtual Machines which are now available.

Dav4-series and Das v4-series Virtual Machines

  • Workloads: For general purpose workloads
  • CPU: up 96 vCPUs
  • RAM: up to 384 GiBs
  • Disk: 2,400 GiBs SSD-based temporary storage
  • Based on AMD EPYC™

Eav4-series and Eas v4-series Virtual Machines

  • Workloads: Memory intensive
  • CPU: up 96 vCPUs
  • RAM: up to 672 GiBs
  • Disk: 2,400 GiBs SSD-based temporary storage
  • Based on AMD EPYC™

NVv4 Azure Virtual Machines

  • Workloads: GPU Visualization
  • CPU: up 32 vCPUs
  • RAM: up to 112GB
  • GPU: up to 16GB of GPU memory
  • Disk: Support for Azure Premium SSD Disks
  • Based on AMD EPYC 7002 processors and virtualized Radeon MI25 GPU

NDv2-series Virtual Machines

  • Workloads: Distributed HPC, AI, and Machine Learning
  • CPU: up 40 vCPUs
  • RAM: up to 672GiB
  • Disk: 2,400 GiBs SSD-based temporary storage
  • GPU: 8 NVIDIA Tesla V100 NVLINK interconnected GPUs with 32 GB of memory each
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