Back in April this year, Microsoft confirmed Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) would be able to run on ARM-based processors. The company has now said that ARM-based VMs on Azure would be generally available this week, starting September 1.
Microsoft has been testing ARM Architecture to power its Azure VMs since April. The company had offered a “Preview” version of ARM support on Azure Virtual Machines. Microsoft claims “hundreds” of customers have been testing the ARM-based Azure VMs.
The new Azure ARM-based VMs are available with the following configurations:
- Dpsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 4 GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs,
- Dplsv5 series, with up to 64 vCPUs and 2 GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 128 GiBs, and
- Epsv5 series, with up to 32 vCPUs and 8 GiBs of memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs
These VMs will support up to 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth; Standard SSDs, Standard HDDs, Premium SSDs, and Ultra Disk Storage can be attached to the virtual machines. Azure Monitor and Azure Backup will help in monitoring the health of data and performance parameters of the VMs.
The aforementioned ARM-powered Azure VMs will now enter “General Availability”. Moving forward, Azure VMs with Ampere Altra Arm processors will be available in “10 Azure regions and multiple availability zones around the world”.
Slots will be available to users in the US (West US2, West Central US, Central US, East US, East US 2); Europe (West Europe, North Europe); Asia (East Asia, Southeast Asia), and Australia (Australia East). Microsoft has assured that it will be adding several more regions after September 1.
During the trial phase, developers and web admins used the VMs for web and application servers, open-source databases, microservices, Java and .NET apps, gaming, and media servers, confirmed Microsoft. In addition to these platforms, ARM-based VMs can be included in Kubernetes clusters. The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) can and will accept the new VMs.
Azure VMs, powered by ARM CPUs, should reliably run Windows 11 Professional and Enterprise Arm editions. Additionally, the processors, support numerous popular Linux distributions. Apart from Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian, Microsoft will gradually add support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux as well.
