Microsoft makes virtual machines on Arm in Azure widely available

Microsoft is making available virtual machines on Azure this week that run on Arm processors. The company has experimented with this before. Microsoft has partnered with Ampere Computing. The service is available in the Western Europe region and can also be used with Kubernetes.

Microsoft is making ARM VMs on Azure available to any user. This will happen from September 1 in ten Azure regions, including Western and Northern Europe. Microsoft started a preview of the VMs earlier this year, which should ultimately provide a better price-performance ratio than machines based on x86 processors.

Microsoft says it is partnering with Ampere on the project, which builds machines based on the Ampere Altra CPUs. These are three different machines: the Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 for general use and the Epsv5 which is better optimized for intensive memory use.

Dpsv5 64 vCpus, 4GiBs memory with vCpu, up to 208GiBs Dplsv5 64 vCpus, 2GiBs memory with vCpu, up to 128GiBs Epsv5 32 vCpus, 8GiBs memory with vCpu, up to 208GiBs

Users can deploy the VMs through their Azure portal or through PowerShell or their CLI. Also, the VMs can be included in a Kubernetes cluster. This is done via Azure Kubernetes Services. Users can run Windows 11 Pro on it, as well as various Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, RHEL, Suse, CentOS, and Debian. Later on, new distros will be added, including Rocky Linux. The prices are unknown. According to Microsoft, these vary by region.