Virtual machine series and sizes

There are a lot of different VM sizes available to choose from in Azure. Note that it is important to know what options there are from a design perspective, because choosing the wrong VM size can have a negative impact on the performance of your VM, or your application installed on the VM. Choosing between the different available options will also have a huge effect on the overall costs. For example, if your company or client wants to reduce costs by migrating data centers to Azure, choosing your VMs wisely will either make your project a success or a failure.

Azure VMs are organized into machine series, starting with the A-series, which are VMs mainly used for general purposes. There are also VM sizes that are optimized for compute, memory, storage, and GPU, as well as high-performance compute VMs. All of the available series and sizes are explained in more detail in the following section.

Available VM series and sizes

At the time of writing this book, the following VM series are available:

Sizes	Type	Description
A0-7, Av2, B, D, DS, Dv2, DSv2, Dv3, Dsv3	General purpose	These VMs have a balanced CPU-to-memory ratio and are ideal for testing and development scenarios. They are also suitable for small and medium databases and web servers with low to medium traffic.
F, Fs, Fsv2	Compute optimized	These VMs have a high CPU-to-memory ratio and are suitable for web servers with medium traffic, application servers, and network appliances for nodes in batch processing.
D, DS, Dv2, DSv2, Ev3, Esv3, G, GS, M	Memory optimized	These VMs have a high memory-to-CPU ratio and are suitable for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics.
Ls	Storage optimized	These VMs have high disk throughput and IO and are suitable for big data, SQL, and NoSQL databases.
NC, NCv2, NCv3, ND, NV	GPU	These VMs are targeted for heavy graphic rendering and video editing, deep learning applications, and machine learning model training. These VMs are available with single or multiple GPUs.
A8-11, H	High-performance compute	These are the fastest VMs available. They offer the most powerful CPU with optional high-throughput network interfaces (RDMA).

VM machine series are updated constantly. New series, types, and sizes are added and removed frequently. To stay up to date with these changes, you can refer to the following site for Windows VM sizes: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/sizes. For Linux VM sizes, you can refer to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/sizes?toc=%2fazure%2fvirtual-machines%2flinux%2ftoc.json.