Today, we’re announcing the release of a new series of VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines called the G-series. G-series sizes provide the most memory, the highest processing power and the largest amount of local SSD of any Virtual Machine size currently available in the public cloud. This extraordinary performance will allow customers to deploy very large scale-up enterprise applications. G-series offers up to 32 vCPUs using the latest Intel® Xeon® processor E5 v3 family, 448GB of memory, and 6.59 TB of local Solid State Drive (SSD) space. This powerful VM size easily handles deployments of mission critical applications such as large relational database servers (SQL Server, MySQL  etc.,) and large NoSQL databases (MongoDB, Cloudera, Cassandra etc.).

“The new G-series on Azure offers unparalleled performance and scale: top-end CPUs coupled to the largest memory, fastest network fabric and the most local SSD capacity of any virtualized hardware in the public cloud. The simplicity of provisioning and managing clusters on Azure is well-matched by the simplicity of using XtremeData’s database engine, dbX: just load data and start analyzing in standard SQL.  Deploying the scale-out dbX engine on this infrastructure will offer customers the fastest, most scalable and least expensive Big Data analytics platform on the market.” – Ravi Chandran, Founder and CTO, XtremeData

G-Series Size Details

In the above table GB is 1000³ and GiB is 1024³

Today, these Virtual Machine sizes are available only in West US. We will continue to add support for other regions.

Note: Resizing an existing Virtual Machine to a Standard_G* size is not supported at this time. Please delete and recreate the Virtual Machine using existing disks.

The pricing details for the new VM sizes can be found on our pricing page, here.

Creating a G-Series Virtual Machine

Navigate to the Azure Preview Portal. Select New(+) and select your favorite OS or VM Image.

Click through the Pricing Tier and select the Standard_G1 Virtual Machine size.

Specify required configuration information and hit Create.

Learn More

If you would like more information on the G-Series VM sizes as well as other Azure VM Sizes then please see the following page for additional details: Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure

–Drew