Announcing the general availability of new Azure burstable virtual machines

Today, we are announcing the general availability of the latest generations of Azure Burstable virtual machine (VM) series – the new Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 VMs based on the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C, AMD EPYC™ 7763v, and Ampere® Altra® Arm-based processors respectively. 

The new generation of Azure burstable B-series v2 VMs are the lowest priced amongst general purpose VMs in Azure and now include native support for Arm-based workloads with the Bpsv2 series. B-series v2 VMs offer up to 15% better price-performance, up to 5x higher network bandwidth, and 10x higher remote storage throughput compared to the previous generation B-series VMs.

Azure customers today can select from a diverse range of Azure virtual machines that are tailored to meet the high CPU performance and utilization needs of their workloads. However, certain categories of workload do not require high levels of CPU utilization and performance on a continuous basis and can be run more cost-effectively on VMs optimized for burstable performance. With B-series v2 VMs, you can balance high CPU utilization and cost savings that automatically meets your workload's real-time requirements. Burstable virtual machines provide high CPU utilization when applications need it and run at a baseline CPU utilization to save cost when high CPU utilization and performance are not required.

B-series v2 VMs are ideal for workloads that experience unpredictable spikes in demand and require occasional bursts of high CPU utilization. This capability makes burstable VMs ideal candidates for a variety of workloads such as web applications, small and medium databases, micro services, code repositories, CI/CD pipelines for development and test environments, and servers for proof-of-concept development that don’t require full CPU performance all the time, but occasionally need to burst to complete tasks quickly.

With the new Arm-based Bpsv2 VMs now available alongside x86-based Bsv2 and new AMD-based Basv2 burstable VMs, customers can now tailor their infrastructure for specific performance and price-performance requirements across CPU architectures. Arm-Based Bpsv2 VMs, with one physical core per vCPU, are ideal for many workloads like microservices, web apps, containers, and small to medium databases. While Bsv2 and Bav2 VMs can run these workloads, they also offer capabilities and infrastructure for monolithic, vectorized workloads, and others that don’t have affinity to Arm-based VMs.

You can choose from multiple memory ratios for a given vCPU size, giving you the flexibility to select the configuration and architecture that is ideal for your workload. Bsv2-series and Basv2-series offer up to 32 vCPUs and 128 GiB of RAM, and the Bpsv2-series offers up to 16 vCPUs with 64 GiB of RAM. All sizes support accelerated networking and network bandwidth up to 6.25 Gbps. To learn more about the pricing of Arm64-based and x86-based VMs, please visit the Azure Virtual Machines pricing pages.

The new Azure B-series v2 VMs support various Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, Debian, SUSE Enterprise Linux and more. Windows Server and Windows Client are supported on x86-based B-series VMs. Client application developers can take advantage of Azure’s highly available, scalable, and secure platform to run cloud-based software, build and test workflows. To help developers increase their agility and support their work, we’ve made Insider Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise available on Arm-based Azure B-series VMs. Access the full list of images in the Azure Marketplace.

The new virtual machines support all remote disk types such as Standard SSD, Standard HDD, Premium SSD and Ultra Disk storage. To learn more about various disk types and their regional availability, please refer to Azure managed disk type. Disk storage is billed separately from virtual machines and to learn more on disk pricing please see pricing for disks. 

Learn more about these new B-series v2 VMs by visiting the Bsv2, Basv2, and Bpsv2 documentation, reading about the regional availability at Azure product availability page, and following this simple migration guide.

You can also take advantage of Spot Virtual Machines, Reserved Instances and Saving Plan that are available for all new B-series VM families to potentially save even more. You can significantly reduce costs and improve your budget forecasting with Reserved VM Instances through upfront one-year or three-year commitments. With the Azure Savings Plan, you have the flexibility to save across multiple Azure Services, including this one. For workloads that can tolerate interruptions and have flexible execution time, using Spot Virtual Machines can significantly reduce the cost of running in Azure and further optimize your cloud spend. Eligible new Azure customers can sign up for an Azure free account and receive $200 Azure credit.

Start running your applications on Azure B-series v2 VMs today. We can’t wait to hear about the amazing workloads you will build with these new VMs.

Learn what our partners have to say about Azure’s latest burstable VMs:

Azure-Ampere-Bpsv2-Burstable-Virtual-Machines

Demonstrating new Arm-based Azure Burstable VMs - Infrastructure Solutions blog - Arm Community blogs - Arm Community

Have questions? Please reach us at Azure Support Options | Microsoft Azure and our experts will be there to help you with your Azure journey.