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Today, Microsoft is excited to announce the General Availability of the new Azure FXv2-series Virtual Machines (VMs), powered by the 5th Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8573C (Emerald Rapids) processor. This release includes Compute-optimized VMs FXmsv2-series and FXmdsv2-series. The FXv2-series VMs are optimally designed and purpose-built for compute-intensive workloads such as databases, data analytics, and electronic design automation (EDA), demanding substantial memory, high-performance storage, and I/O bandwidth.

FXv2-series VMs offer key advantages for SQL Server workloads, including enhanced performance that ensures efficient management of large volumes of data and transactions. This is essential for applications requiring high I/O operations per second (IOPS) and low latency.

Additionally, FXv2-series VMs offer EDA customers an enhanced Intel-based option with larger L3 caches, higher instructions per clock, increased memory capacity, and faster storage compared to the previous generation FXv1 VMs. These improvements are especially beneficial for customers in the semiconductor industry, as they help to reduce chip design turnaround time, accelerate time-to-market, and enhance license utilization to lower overall TCO.

Azure FXv2-series VMs have been engineered to deliver exceptional CPU performance of up to 50% better than the previous generation FXv1-series VMs. Azure FXv2-series VMs feature an all-core-turbo frequency up to 4.0 GHz. The FXv2-series offers VM sizes up to 96 vCPUs, which is twice the number of vCPUs compared to the previous generation. Furthermore, these new VMs offer up to 1,832 GiB memory with a memory to core ratio of 21GiB/vCPU.

FXv2-series VMs support the NVMe protocol for both local and remote disks, delivering fast, low-latency storage performance. NVMe enables up to 2x IOPS and up to 5x throughput in remote storage performances compared to the previous generation. These VMs support all remote disk types, including Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk, offering up to 400K IOPS and up to 11.25 GBps throughput. Additionally, these VMs offer up to 70 Gbps of network bandwidth. Enhancements from Azure Boost significantly improve networking, storage, overall CPU performance, and security of the VMs. It utilizes the new Microsoft Azure Network Adapter (MANA), a next-generation network interface that provides stable, forward-compatible drivers for Windows and Linux operating systems.

These VMs have enhanced AI capabilities with Intel® Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX), delivering higher inference and training performance, and enhanced security capabilities with Intel® Total Memory Encryption (TME) technology, providing enhanced protection to data in system memory.

These VMs are offered in standard sizes and constrained-core configurations, which gives you flexibility to choose the core and memory setup that best suits your workload. You may also choose VMs with local disk or without, with the FXmdsv2-series and FXmsv2-series, respectively. You can learn more about the new Azure FXv2-series VMs by visiting the specification pages at FXmdsv2-series , FXmsv2-series and the associated constrained-core sizes.

The new FXv2-series VMs are broadly available in the following Azure regions: Australia East, Canada Central, Central US, East US, East US 2, Germany West Central, Japan East, Korea Central, South Africa North, South Central US, Sweden Central, Switzerland North, West Europe, West US 3. Additional regions will be coming in 2025.  To learn more, refer to Product Availability by Region.

Our customers have shared their perspective:

“The new Azure Fxv2 series VMs offer a perfect mix of capabilities for running Oracle databases and RAC clusters. Database workloads benefit from large number of CPU cores, large memory size, high network bandwidth, and fast storage. The Fxv2 have all of the above! The most notable, however, is the 400,000 IOPS and 11,250 MBPS storage throughput. In a 3-node FlashGrid Cluster running Oracle RAC this means 1,200,000 IOPS and 33,750 MBPS, elevating the database performance to new levels. We expect the Fxv2 series soon to become the #1 choice for FlashGrid customers running high-performance Oracle databases on Azure.”  —Art Danielov, CEO, FlashGrid.

“At OMP, we are committed to optimizing our Unison Planning™ solution that drives supply chain excellence. In our partnership with Microsoft, we have always extensively used the FXv1 series. We have recently partnered with Microsoft to preview the FXv2 series and the upgraded hardware has already shown a performance increase of up to 40%. Moreover, the ability to scale up to 96 vCPUs with 1.8TB of memory doubles our per-VM performance, significantly improving capacity management for our solution.” – Michiel De Palmeneire, Platform Manager, OMP.

“The new Azure FXv2-Series Virtual Machines represent a huge step forward for optimizing performance. Through our collaboration, we’ve seen performance gains up to 5X that will deliver transformative impact to customers taking advantage of our premium storage services with Pure Storage Cloud on Azure. Combining Microsoft’s high performance VMs with Pure Storage’s rich feature set accelerates the adoption of mission critical applications in Azure for our mutual customers.” – Cody Hosterman, Senior Director, Cloud Product Management, Pure Storage.

“With the performance results we have achieved on the new FXv2-series, we have confidence in providing our largest Unisys ClearPath MCP System clients a seamless transition to Azure, without needing to modify or migrate any of their code.” — Ken Henry, VP, Unisys Solutions Development, Enterprise Computing Solutions.

Here’s what our technology partners are saying:

“Canonical is pleased to see the significant performance enhancements with Microsoft Azure’s new FXv2-series virtual machines. Ubuntu and Ubuntu Pro are fully compatible with these new instances allowing customers to use a proven and widely-used platform ideal for these compute-intensive workloads. Ubuntu Pro on the new FXv2-series offers comprehensive features for enterprise security, compliance, and operational stability. This enables users to take full advantage of Ubuntu’s capabilities and vast software ecosystem on Azure”— Jehudi Sierra-Castro, Public Cloud Alliance Director.

To learn more about the FXv2-series VM pricing, please visit the Azure Virtual Machines pricing. To learn more about remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD (v1), Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disk storage please refer to Azure managed disk type.

The FXv2-series VMs are precisely engineered for compute-intensive tasks, making them ideal for high-performance data processing, complex operations, and intensive analytics. They deliver exceptional performance and efficiency, providing a versatile solution for a wide range of computing needs. Explore the FXv2-series VMs today and discover how they can enhance your performance and operational efficiency.

Have questions? Please reach us at Azure Support and our experts will be there to help you with your Azure journey.