More Azure VM sizes Available

Dushmantha Charaka February 02, 2015 0 Comments

At the beginning of January, Microsoft announced the general availability of bigger Azure VM sizes. The G-Series proved more RAM, more logical processors combined with lots of SSD disk storage – these VM sizes should provide extraordinary performance. The G-Series currently scales from Standard_G1 (2 CPU, 28 GB ram, 412 SSD), through to Standard_G5 (32 CPS, 448GB Ram, 6.5TB SSD). http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2015/01/08/azure-is-now-bigger-faster-more-open-and-more-secure/ provides more capacity details for these new VMs.

These VM sizes are ideal for large database servers – not only SQL Server, but also My SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Cloudera, DataStax and others. Each VM can also have up to 64 TB of attached data disks! To help the compute grunt of these VMs, they feature the latest Intel CPUs (Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3 family) and DDR4 memory.

When Microsoft first announced these new VM sizes, availability was restricted to the West US Azure region (but they were clear that they were working to add support in additional regions). To help me find where I can get a particular VM size, I wrote a script function to find out which regions hold a particular VM size. Here's the function:

Function wherecaniget {
[CmdletBinding()]
param ($VMSize)
# Get Locations
$Locations = Get-AzureLocation
# Where is that VM size?
Foreach ($loc in $Locations) {
    $ln = $loc.DisplayName
    $rs = $loc.VirtualMachineRoleSizes
    If ($rs -contains $VMSize) {$ln}
}
}

I notice that these new VM sizes are now available in the East US region as well.