Azure Series Explained: A, B, D, E, N


Applies to: Nerdio for Azure (NFA) Professional, Enterprise and Core.

Refer this KB article to determine if you are a NFA user.


A Series

Starts at: $11.68/per month **

Entry-level economical VMs for dev/test *

Generally used in small deployments where cost consciousness outweighs performance.  Only use in rare instance implementations with non-customer facing/contact VMs. 


B Series

 

Starts at: $2.74/per month **

Economical burstable VMs *

B-series are economical virtual machines that provide a low-cost option for workloads that typically run at a low to moderate baseline CPU utilization, but sometimes need to burst to significantly higher CPU utilization when the demand rises. 

We like B-series for AD servers, servers that are 24x7 and non-customer facing/contact servers. 

When idle the series will bank credits, and use those credits later when CPU utilization needs to burst past the baseline.  When rebooted B series will lose their credits which can take hours to rebuild without too much impact.  When booted the B series will only have access to allow for a maximum of 60% CPU utilization until a bank of credits can be consumed. 

We do not recommend that B-series machines are utilized for File Servers supporting FS Logix profile redirection technology. This is also true for AVD hosts unless you are supporting a very small and light group of 2-3 users. This is due to the disk IO limitations of the series. It will be important to watch the data disk IO disk queue depth performance of disks on a server in this scenario and upgrade immediately if the disk becomes a performance bottleneck to user experience. 


D Series

Starts at: $41.61/per month **

General purpose compute *

D-series VMs feature fast CPUs, and optimal CPU-to-memory configuration making them suitable for most production workloads. DSv3-series instances carry more powerful CPUs and the same memory and disk configurations as the D-series. 

Ds2-64 v3 instances (ie. Ds4v3 – 4 core x 16GB RAM) are the latest hyper-threaded generation of general-purpose instances and are based on the 2.4 GHz Intel Xeon® E5-2673 v3 (Haswell) processor or the latest 2.3 GHz Intel XEON ® E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell). They can achieve higher speeds with Intel Turbo Boost Technology 2.0. The Ds-series supports Azure Premium SSDs. 

We like D series for performance and they pair well with premium SSD.  A must for solutions or presentation layers that are customer facing.  There is not a lot of difference in price with v3 instances (as opposed to v2) which makes them ideal. 

Example use cases include many enterprise-grade applications, relational databases, in-memory caching, and analytics. The latest generations are ideal for applications that demand faster CPUs, better local disk performance or higher memories. 


E Series

Starts at: $91.98/per month **

Optimized for in-memory hyper-threaded applications *

The E-series family of Azure virtual machines are optimized for heavy in-memory applications such as SAP HANA. These VMs are setup with high memory-to-core ratios, which makes them well-suited for relational database servers, with medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics. The E-series VMs range from 2 to 64 vCPUs and 16-432 GiB RAM, respectively. The Es-series supports Azure Premium SSDs.

We like the E series for session hosts and collections where the line of business applications consume a higher than normal memory footprint per user.  Software that is optimized for multi-user session hosts can often consume large footprints of memory.

Example use cases include SAP HANA, SAP S/4 HANA, SQL Hekaton and other large in-memory business critical workloads.


N Series

Starts at: $657/per month **

GPU enabled virtual machines *

The N-series is a family of Azure Virtual Machines with GPU capabilities. GPUs are ideal for compute and graphics-intensive workloads, helping customers to fuel innovation through scenarios like high-end remote visualization, deep learning, and predictive analytics. 

The N-series has three different offerings aimed at specific workloads: 

  • The NC-series is focused on high-performance computing and machine learning workloads. The latest version—NCv3—features NVIDIA’s Tesla V100 GPU. 
  • The ND-series is focused on training and inference scenarios for deep learning. It uses the NVIDIA Tesla P40 GPUs. The latest version - NDv2 - features the NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. 
  • The NV-series enables powerful remote visualization workloads and other graphics-intensive applications backed by the NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPU. 

We like N series for graphic needs related to engineering and 3D modeling.  The foot print is quite large which makes them good shared machines.  Assigning 2-4 users per N series as an RDS Session Host is an ideal for distribution and performance requirements.  NV series will be the primary N series instance.  Approach other N series with a very specific need or application requirement. 

Example use cases include simulation, deep learning, graphics rendering, video editing, gaming and remote visualization. 


*Source - docs.microsoft.com

 **Source - azure.microsoft.com - For Updated Pricing Check HERE

 

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