Microsoft has introduced a new type of virtual machine for its Azure cloud computing platform, suitable for the most demanding workloads.

The top of the line D-Series VMs feature up to16 virtual cores, 112GB of RAM and as much as 800GB of local flash storage.

“The new sizes offer an optimal configuration for running workloads that require increased processing power and fast local disk I/O,” said Kenaz Kwa, program manager at Azure Compute Runtime.

D-Series VMs are available immediately in the US, Western Europe and parts of Asia.

More power
According to Kwa, the CPUs used for D-Series are approximately 60 percent faster than those found in Microsoft’s tried and tested A-Series VMs. The new machines offer much more RAM and up to 5x faster SSD storage, making them especially suitable for analytics and database applications.

D-Series is available in two flavors: ‘General Purpose’ (D1-D4) and ‘High Memory’ (D11-D14). The General Purpose machines have up to eight cores, up to 28 GB of RAM and up to 400 GB of flash, with prices starting around US$127 per month.

Meanwhile, a High Memory configuration can include from two to 16 cores, up to 800 GB of SSD storage and a minimum of 14 GB of RAM, going all the way up to 112 GB.

Prices start at approximately $300 per month, reaching $1,943 per month for the most powerful VMs available on Azure. It should be noted that these machines have been designed for short, compute-intensive tasks which are likely to take hours or days, rather than months.

The SSDs in question are local to the host and provide higher I/O, but Microsoft warns that they lack persistency features, and the data they store could be lost in the event of a physical hardware failure.

Kwa said D-Series can help customers take advantage of the latest software features, such as the Buffer Pool Extensions and TempDB in SQL Server 2014, which benefit greatly from local SSD storage.

All of the new D-Series VMs are also available in ‘basic tier’ configurations that are cheaper, but lack load balancing, auto-scaling and other production features.