In addition to the new Lv2 size announcement from earlier today, I am also excited to share two GA sizes available today:
- We’re announcing general availability (GA) of the B-Series VMs.
- We are announcing GA of the Azure M-Series, the VM family with the largest CPU and memory sizes, with up to 4 TB of RAM.
B-Series general availability
Earlier in September, we announced the preview of the burstable size called the B-Series. I am excited to share that B-Series is now generally available. B-series VMs provide the lowest cost option for customers with flexible vCPU requirements. These are useful for workloads like web servers, small databases, and development or test environments where CPU utilization is low most of the time but spikes for short durations. B-Series VMs offer consistent baseline CPU performance and let you build up credits which can be used for peak CPU usage. These sizes give you extreme cost flexibility and flexible value.
The B-Series VMs are available in the following sizes:
| Size | vCPU’s | Memory: GiB | Local SSD: GiB | Baseline CPU Performance of VM | Max CPU Performance of VM |
| Standard_B1s | 1 | 1 | 4 | 10% | 100% |
| Standard_B1ms | 1 | 2 | 4 | 20% | 100% |
| Standard_B2s | 2 | 4 | 8 | 40% | 200% |
| Standard_B2ms | 2 | 8 | 16 | 60% | 200% |
| Standard_B4ms | 4 | 16 | 32 | 90% | 400% |
| Standard_B8ms | 8 | 32 | 64 | 135% | 800% |
For more information regarding B-Series VM capabilities and pricing please visit our Azure B-Series documentation.
These sizes are available in East US, East US2, West US, Central US, North Central US, South Central US, North Europe, West Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan West, Australia East, Australia South East, Central India, Canada Central, Canada East, West US2, UK South, UK West and Korea Central. We will continue to add additional regions in the coming months.
M-Series GA and the new 4TB size
Today, we are releasing the GA of the M-Series that provides the largest VM sizes in Azure. With the M-series, you can now deploy up to 3.8 TiB (4 TB) of RAM on a single VM. These VMs offer up to 128 hyper-threaded vCPUs, powered by Intel® Xeon® 2.5 GHz E7-8890 v3 processors. This newly released M-series size adds to our already impressive set of sizes offering large amounts of memory, including the purpose-built SAP HANA Large Instances, offering up to 20 TB of memory, the most offered by any public cloud.
The Azure M-series is perfectly suited for your large in-memory workloads like SAP HANA and SQL Hekaton. With the M-series, these databases can load large datasets into memory and utilize the fast memory access with huge amounts of vCPU parallel processing to speed up queries and enable real-time analytics. You can deploy these large workloads in minutes and on-demand, scaling elastically as your usage demands. With availability SLAs of 99.95% for an Availability Set, 99.9% for a single node, and 99.99% when we GA Availability Zones, you can provide application level SLA guarantees to your users for both your HA and scale-out configurations. Like all Azure VMs, you will be billed per-second (rounded down to the nearest minute) and you can even set-up automation on the platform to make sure you shut down and scale these VMs automatically, saving even more cost.
The M-Series VMs are available in the following sizes:
| Size | vCPU’s | Memory (GiB) | Local SSD (GiB) | Max data disks |
| M64s | 64 | 1024 | 2048 | 32 |
| M64ms | 64 | 1792 | 2048 | 32 |
| M128s | 128 | 2048 | 4096 | 64 |
| M128ms | 128 | 3800 | 4096 | 64 |
You can get more information on the M-series VM sizes here. To request access to the M-series, submit your request quota in the supported region. After your quota has been approved, you can use the Azure portal or API’s to deploy.
You can learn more about running SAP support on Azure here: https://azure.com/sap/.
We are launching the M-series in the following regions, with more regions available in the coming months: West US 2, East US 2, and West Europe
See ya around,
Corey