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Microsoft Azure announces, in tests, an ARM-based virtual machine

microsoft has announced the availability, although still in the testing phase, of a virtual machine based on ARM processors. Specific, on Ampere Altra chipswith the aim of offering its customers a machine with as much power as possible, but consuming as little energy as possible.

The news has been given Paul Nash, Azure Computing Platform Product Managerhighlighting that «the new virtual machines are designed to efficiently run workloads at scale, such as web servers, application servers, open source or cloud-native databases, as well as .NET or Java applications, gaming or multimedia servers, among others«.

In specific cases, the new ARM-based chips offer 50% better performance for the price than virtual machines based on comparable x86 chips. This is a noticeable performance boost for running workloads. The new range includes memory-optimized Dpsv5 and Epsv5 general purpose virtual machines.

According to Microsoft, the new virtual machines offer up to 3 GHz Ampere Altra chips with up to 64 virtual CPUs and up to 40 Gbps of network capacity, available with 2, 4 and 8 GiB memory configurations per virtual CPU. They can optionally have high-performance local SSD storage.

These virtual machines can run Ubuntu Linux, CentOS, Windows 11 Professional and Windows 11 Enterprise operating systems. According to Microsoft, they will soon be compatible with other systems as well, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Debian, AlmaLinux and FlatCar. In Azure they are already working to be able to provide compatibility with them as soon as possible.

In this first test phase, these test virtual machines will only be available in certain areas. Specific, in the United States in the West US 2 and West Central Azure zones, and in Europe in West Europe, that is, in the area corresponding to Western Europe. All those who want to request access to the test phase to use these virtual machines can do so by filling out this online form.

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