Virtual Machines can be created for both Linus and Windows users within seconds from the Azure Admin dashboard. Microsoft offers many different Virtual Machines including;
- A-Series for entry-level economical VM’s for dev/test
- Bs-Series for economical burstable VMs
- D-Series for general purpose compute
- DC-Series for protection of data in use
- E-Series for optimization of in-memory hyper-threaded applications
- F-Series for compute optimized virtual machines
- G-Series for memory and storage optimized virtual machines
- H-Series for high performance computing virtual machines
- Ls-Series for storage optimized virtual machines
- M-Series for memory optimized virtual machines
- Mv2-Series is the largest memory for optimized virtual machines
- N-Series for GPU enabled virtual machines
Below will give you a short explanation of the different Virtual Machines products and the cost as of July 2020 (subject to change anytime).
A-Series:
A-series are virtual machines that is most commonly used for entry level workloads. It is a low-cost virtual machine, that is suited for testing and smaller development tasks.
Example: A-Series virtual machines can be used to develop and low traffic server testing. It is perfect for small and medium databases that you need limited performance for.
A-Series pricing start from $11.68 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s – see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/)
Bs-series:
Bs-series are virtual machines used for low CPU utilization but need the flexibility and power to accelerate the CPU utilization when needed.
Example: Bs-Series virtual machines can be used for development and testing tasks for low traffic servers and is a good fit for small databases and services.
Bs-Series pricing starts from $2.74 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s – see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/)
D-Series:
With D-series virtual machines you can combine VCPU’s memory and storage. This combination will meet most production related requirements. You get better performance and faster CPU’s
Example: D-Series virtual machines are a good fit for enterprise applications, relational databases, memory caching, and analytics.
D-Series pricing starts from $41.61 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s – see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/)
E-Series:
E-Series virtual machines is developed for customers that need to use a lot of in-memory applications such as SAP HANA. The E-Series virtual machines have great performance and memory. For more specs see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/series/
Example: E-series are used for SAP HANA (E64s_v3 only), SAP S/4 HANA application layer, SAP NetWeaver application layer, SQL Hekaton and other large in-memory business critical workloads.
E-Series pricing starts from $91.98 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s – see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/)
F-Series:
The F-Series virtual machines have a higher CPU-to-memory ratio. They are developed for intensive work with a lot of speed. For more specs see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/series/
Example: F-Series virtual machines can be used for batch processing, analytics and heavy-duty web server traffic.
F-Series pricing starts from $35.77 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s – see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/)
G-Series
The G-Series virtual machines are almost as powerful as it gets. It has twice the amount of memory and 4-times more storage than the D-Series. It is great for very demanding applications.
Example: The G-Series virtual machines can be used to handle your SQL and noSQL databases, ERP applications, SAP and data warehouse requirements.
G-Series pricing starts from $320.47 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s – see https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/)
H-Series
The H-series virtual machines are built for HPC applications. Fluid dynamics and finite element analysis is perfect for the H-series virtual machines
Example: Companies that do finite element analysis, fluid dynamics, seismic processing, quantum simulations and other heavy workload task that require a lot of memory, speed, bandwidth and processing power, should use H-series virtual machines.
H-Series pricing starts from $581.08 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s)
Lsv2-Series
With Lsv2-Series virtual machines you get low latency directly mapped with a local NVMe storage. You can get up to 80 vCPUs configured hyper threaded.
Example: You can use Lsv2-Series for noSQL databases incl. Cassandra and MongoDB etc. Lsv2-Series is good for advanced data warehouse and if you run large database transactions
Lsv2-Series pricing starts from $455.52 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s)
M-Series
M-Series virtual machines are one of Microsoft most powerful virtual machines. The M-series are perfect for in-memory workloads. SAP HANA workloads is perfect here. The M-series offer almost twice as many vCPU as the Lsv2-Series. 128 vCPU on a single virtual machine, which give you high performance.
Example: Use the M-series when you run SAP Hana, SAP S/4 HANA and other large business workloads that require a lot of computer power that runs parallel.
M-series pricing starts from $1,121.65 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s)
N-Series
N-series offer you capabilities within GPU. GPU is beneficial if you need to run large graphical processes, simulation scenarios and other large virtual imaging that require power.
N-series pricing starts from $657 per month (price may differ from Windows virtual machine’s and Linux virtual machine’s)
