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Microsoft has announced the general availability of NVMe-supported Ebsv5 virtual machines (VMs) on Azure. The company promises up to three times faster IOPS (input/output operations per second) for remote storage. In addition, Microsoft claims up to six times more throughput.

The tech giant says it is responding to the growing pile of data generated daily by businesses. This doesn’t just refer to the amount of data in the cloud but also the ever-increasing importance of data-intensive workloads. Therefore, the new Ebsv5 series of VMs is specifically designed for “memory-intensive business-critical” applications, relational database servers and in-memory data analytics workloads.

Bigger and faster

Microsoft says it can achieve up to 260,000 IOPS with Ebsv5, thanks partly to the deployment of NVMe technology. The claim of “6x” faster throughput does not come out of the blue: NVMe storage is a huge step forward versus the SCSI interface that Azure VMs only used until 2022. Microsoft began offering Ebsv5 to select users last year.

The company is adding two new VM formats: E96 and E112i. The number of vCPUs goes from a maximum of 64 to 96 and 112, respectively. The GiB amount of memory also goes up: to as much as 672 versus 512 before it. Microsoft’s blog lists all the numbers.

The Ebsv5 VMs are based on 3rd generation Xeon processors from Intel. This quarter, the chip manufacturer has already introduced its successor. Still, the speed increase in Azure VMs indicates once again that there can be multiple bottlenecks in a VM environment. At least Microsoft will be pleased with the new offering, especially since it allegedly struggled with capacity issues on Azure just last year.