Microsoft Launches Arm-based Azure VMs Powered by Ampere Chips

Following a preview in April, Microsoft this morning announced the general availability of virtual machines (VMs) on Azure featuring the Ampere Altra, a processor based on the Arm architecture. From a report: The first Azure VMs powered by Arm chips, Microsoft says that they're accessible in 10 Azure regions today and can be included in Kubernetes clusters managed using Azure Kubernetes Service beginning on September 1.

The Azure Arm-based VMs have up to 64 virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of memory per core and 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as SSD local and attachable storage. Microsoft describes them as "engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads," including open source databases, Java and .NET applications and gaming, web, app and media servers. Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Debian are available on the VMs day one, with support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux to arrive in the future. Microsoft notes that Java apps in particular can run with few additional code changes, thanks to the company's contributions to the OpenJDK project.

Extend.

[waspleg]

Your post history has a lot of defense for them. Why?

Re:

[gweihir]

Probably just an useful idiot. There are tons of those.

How do they compare to Graviton?

[1s44c]

The obvious question is how do they compare to AWS Graviton chips in terms of cost and performance? Is this more Azure checkbox ticking or are these things actuality useful?

Re:How do they compare to Graviton?

[bill_mcgonigle]

> Is this more Azure checkbox ticking or are these things actuality useful?

Amazon has massive CIA contracts, Microsoft has the NSA_KEY

So you have a a choice.

Re: How do they compare to Graviton?

[1s44c]

That has nothing to do with chip performance.

if there is any thing interesting..

[DarkOx]

Its that M$ would open a significant new platform offering on Azure without supporting "Windows Server" on it. I know they say Windows Server ARM64 is supposed to drop at some point but if it was really an important part of the long term strategy and roadmap you'd expect they'd coordinate it with ARM Azure offerings. Seems like an administration that NT hasnt got a future in the server room to me.

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[PCM2]

Actually, the thing that puzzled me is that I thought you had to run Windows Server in any kind of cloud instance. That was one of the problems with serving virtual desktops running Windows; the licensing didn't allow it. Instead, you had to run an instance of Windows Server that had been stripped down and modified to look like a Windows 10 desktop (even though it wasn't one really, and you still needed to license it like Windows Server). I guess this policy has changed?

I agree that it's weird to not even s

Re:

[Darinbob]

I don't know Azure, but Azure DevOps supports mostly Linux VMs and containers with a choice of Intel or Arm. I assume that Azure DevOps is built on top of Azure, but I could be wrong.

What do you think about arm?

[WaffleMonster]

Is anyone running anything important on an arm server? Any opinions? Are these systems stable? Appreciably any better or worse than x86?

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[Darinbob]

Well, I did have a possible use for Arm based container as part of a set of build servers (under Azure DevOps). Solved that problem by getting cross compilers instead. I know that doing something other than web servers in the cloud is highly unusual, but containers and VMs are handy for other things.