Update: NC v2-series Azure Virtual Machines will be retired on 31 August 2023

Note: NC-series was previously announced to be retired on 31 August 2022. We have extended the retirement date to 31 August 2023. See updated post here.

Azure NC v2-series virtual machines, powered by NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs, have been replaced by newer GPUs which offer increased performance and software functionality, such as the NVIDIA Tesla V100-based NC v3-series. The NC v3-series offers roughly twice the baseline per-GPU performance as the NC v2, and introduces TensorCores, which can accelerate specific types of CUDA operations by a factor of twelve over the P100-based NC v2. NC v2-series virtual machine sizes will be retired on 31 August 2022. 

After 31 August 2022, any remaining NC v2 virtual machines on your subscription will be set to a deallocated state, cease to be available, and will no longer incur billing charges.  

Note: This VM size retirement only impacts the VM sizes in the original NC, ND, and NC v2-series powered by Keppler and Pascal GPUs. (K80, P40, and P100) This retirement announcement does not apply to the newer NC v3, NC T4 v3, and ND v2-Series virtual machines. 

Required Action 

We’re retiring NC v2 VMs on 31 August 2022. All NC v2 VMs will need to be de-allocated by that date.  For recommendations on which VMs to migrate your NC v2 workloads to, or for help with the creation of new VMs, please see the GPU compute migration guide.  Visit the Azure Virtual Machine pricing page for additional information. 

Help and support 

You can reach us directly at HPC VM Retirement. If you have a support plan and you need technical help, please create a support request.