H-Series instances for Azure Virtual Machines now available

H-Series instances for Azure Virtual Machines are now available in the South Central US region. At launch, the H-Series will be among the fastest virtual machines available in Azure in terms of performance per core (ACU benchmark). Depending on application and scenario offering, it gets as much as a 30 to 50 percent performance increase compared to other virtual machines. For more information about ACU/vCPU numbers for the H-Series, please visit the “Sizes for virtual machines in Azure” documentation pages for Windows and Linux. For CoreMark and SPECint results, please visit the Compute benchmark scores for Windows VMs and Compute benchmark scores for Linux VMs documentation pages.

H-Series instances are for high-end computational needs, like molecular modeling and computational fluid dynamics. They’re built on Intel Haswell E5-2667 v3 processors, with 8-core and 16-core virtual machine sizes featuring DDR4 memory and local solid-state drive (SSD) storage. Besides substantial CPU power, the H-Series offers diverse options for remote direct memory access (RDMA) and low-latency networking using FDR InfiniBand, along with several memory configurations to support memory-intensive computational requirements.

The rollout of the H-Series is gradual, and will initially require customers to open a support ticket to access the cluster.