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Microsoft Azure users looking to find just the right virtual machine configurations for their workloads now have another option to choose from as the company’s latest Lsv2-series virtual machines are now generally available.
The new Lsv2-series virtual machines join an expanding range of virtual machines offered by Microsoft Azure, from general-purpose VMs to high-performance configurations built for a variety of business computing requirements.
The Lsv2-series VMs, which previously were available in preview, features high throughput, low latency and directly-mapped local NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) storage, wrote Joe Pelley, principal program manager for Azure Virtual Machines, in a recent post on the Azure Blog.
The Lsv2 VMs run on the AMD EPYCTM 7551 processor and are offered in various configurations from 8 to 80 virtual CPUs with simultaneous multi-threading, wrote Pelley. Each VM features 8 GiB of memory and one 1.92TB NVMe SSD device per eight virtual CPUs, with up to 19.2TB (10 x 1.92TB) available on the 80vCPU L80s v2.
“Customers from all over the globe and across a broad range of industries participated in the Lsv2-series VMs preview during the second half of 2018,” wrote Pelley.
The Lsv2-series is a storage-optimized VM that features high disk throughput and IO, making it a good choice for big data workloads, SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing and large transactional databases such as Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis. “In general, applications that can benefit from large in-memory databases are a good fit for these VMs,” wrote Pelley.
Lessons learned from customers during the Lsv2 preview period were used to help Microsoft improve and optimize the VM offering and optimize performance with the NVMe disks, wrote Pelley. “These performance levels are possible thanks to the optimization of Windows Server 2019 on Azure and Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 releases in the Azure Marketplace. Throughout 2019 we will continue to add Lsv2-series optimized Linux distributions in the Azure Marketplace.”
The Lsv2 VMs are available in a range of sizes using from eight vCPUs and 64GiB of memory up to 80 vCPUs and 640GiB of memory. Performance levels will vary depending on workloads, configurations and the operating system that is used, wrote Pelley.
The latest Lsv2-series VMs are being launched in the East US, East US 2, West Europe and SE Asia regions to start, with additional availability in more regions in the coming months. The West US 2 will see availability by the end of February, while the North Europe region will gain services in April.
Lsv2-series VMs support pay-as-you-go, low priority and one- or three-year reserved instance (RI) pricing for both Windows and Linux.
The Microsoft Azure VM offerings include general-purpose VMs aimed at testing and development, small to medium databases and small to medium web servers; compute-optimized VMs designed for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes and application servers; and memory-optimized VMs built for relational database servers, medium to large caches and in-memory analytics.
The Azure VM offerings also include GPU-optimized VMs designed for heavy graphics rendering and photo editing as well as high-performance compute VMs that offer optional high-throughput network interfaces.
Users can select the VMs they need based on the operating systems and software being used, as well as their vCPU, memory and storage requirements.