Azure’s beefy, powerful G-series VM types are now available in East US 2 region. In October 2014, Microsoft announced G-series Azure VM types designed to run enterprise workloads that demand large amounts of memory and CPU power.
Based on the latest Intel Xeon processor E5 v3 family, these VMs will be able to run compute-intensive applications in the cloud. Intel’s new E5 V3 family of processors are exclusively designed for servers running in virtualized environments. At AWS re:Invent 2014, Amazon announced C4 instance types that are based on the same processor.
Equipped with local SSD storage, G-series VMs will deliver better IOPS than their counterparts. Microsoft claims that the G-series provides more memory and SSD storage than any VM size available in the public cloud. The largest VM type supports 448 GB RAM and 6.5 TB of local SSD storage. Customers running large relational database servers or NoSQL databases can take advantage of these VMs.
Below is the pricing information of Azure G-services VMs.
Linux VMs based on G4 and G5 VM types may need to be tweaked to properly format and mount the resource drive. Microsoft has provided guidance on resolving this issue.
During the inital phase of availability, customers need to request access to launch new VM types in supported regions.