New D-Series of Azure VMs with 60% Faster CPUs, More Memory and Local SSD Disks
Today I’m excited to announce that we just released a new set of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure. These VM sizes are now available to be used immediately by every Azure customer.
The new D-Series of VMs can be used with both Azure Virtual Machines and Azure Cloud Services. In addition to offering faster vCPUs (approximately 60% faster than our A series) and more memory (up to 112 GB), the new VM sizes also all have a local SSD disk (up to 800 GB) to enable much faster IO reads and writes.
The new VM sizes available today include the following:
General Purpose D-Series VMs
| Name | vCores | Memory (GB) | Local SSD Disk (GB) |
| Standard_D1 | 1 | 3.5 | 50 |
| Standard_D2 | 2 | 7 | 100 |
| Standard_D3 | 4 | 14 | 200 |
| Standard_D4 | 8 | 28 | 400 |
High Memory D-Series VMs
| Name | vCores | Memory (GB) | Local SSD Disk (GB) |
| Standard_D11 | 2 | 14 | 100 |
| Standard_D12 | 4 | 28 | 200 |
| Standard_D13 | 8 | 56 | 400 |
| Standard_D14 | 16 | 112 | 800 |
For pricing information, please see Virtual Machine Pricing Details.
Local SSD Disk and SQL Server Buffer Pool Extensions
A temporary drive on the VMs (D:\ on Windows, /mnt or /mnt/resource on Linux) is mapped to the local SSDs exposed on the D-Service VMs, and provides a really good option for replicated storage workloads, like MongoDB, or for significantly increasing the performance of SQL Server 2014 by enabling its unique Buffer Pool Extensions (BPE) feature.
SQL Server 2014’s Buffer Pool Extensions allows you to extend the SQL Engine Buffer Pool with the memory of local SSD disks to significantly improve the performance of SQL workloads. The Buffer Pool is a global memory resource used to cache data pages for much faster read operations. Without any code changes in your application, you can enable the buffer pool support with the SSDs of the D-Series VMs using a simple T-SQL query with just four lines:
ALTER SERVER CONFIGURATION SET BUFFER POOL EXTENSION ON SIZE = <size> [ KB | MB | GB ] FILENAME = 'D:\SSDCACHE\EXAMPLE.BPE'
No code changes are required in your application, and all write operations will continue to be durably persisted in VM drives persisted in Azure Storage. More details on configuring and using BPE can be found here.
Start Using the D-Series VMs Today
You can start using the new D-Series VM sizes immediately. They can be easily created and used via both the current Azure Management Portal as well as Preview Portal, as well as from the Azure management command-line/scripts/APIs.
To learn more about the D-Series please read this post which has even more details about them, as well as check out the Azure documentation center.
Hope this helps,
Scott