The General Purpose Dpsv5 and Dplsv5 and Memory Optimized Epsv5 pricing tiers for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) brings the ability to host Virtual Machine using Arm-based CPUs in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It’s been a few years since I first wrote about Microsoft working on bringing ARM CPUs to Microsoft Azure with Project Olympus 2 back in 2017. Finally, the time has come that Microsoft is now releasing General Availability of these Arm-based VM pricing tiers.

The following is the list of Azure Arm-based Virtual Machine:

General Purpose
- Dpsv5 series – up to 64 vCPUs and 4GiBs memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs
- Dplsv5 series – up to 64 vCPUs and 2GiBs memory per vCPU up to 128 GiBs
Memory Optimized
- Epsv5 series – up to 32 vCPUs and 8GiBs memory per vCPU up to 208 GiBs

When provisioning an Azure Virtual Machine, the Image used to provision the VM must also support deploying to an Arm-based VM. When the VM Image chosen for a new VM, the Azure Portal will enable the ability to select the VM architecture of Arm64. Once doing so, the Arm-based VM Sizes / Pricing Tiers will be available for selection.

The following screenshot shows what the Azure Portal looks like with a Arm64 architecture supported VM Image selected allowing the selection of an Arm-based VM Size. The “See all sizes” option when selecting the VM Size will open up a larger UI to select the Arm-based Size out of the many sizes offered within the new D-series v5 and E-series v5 Arm-based options.

Screenshot: Azure Portal showing provisioning a VM using Arm-based VM Size pricing tiers

Azure provides a choice of x64 or Arm64-based virtual machines to run your applications. x64-based VMs provide the most software compatibility while Arm64-based VMs provide up to 50% better price-performance than comparable x64 VMs. Arm64-based VMs also help developers build Arm-compatible software without cross-compilation.
Azure Portal info about VM architecture selection

The General Availability announcement from Microsoft on the new Arm-based series explains a bit more details about what is available with this new offering.

About the Author

Chris Pietschmann

Chris Pietschmann is a Microsoft MVP, HashiCorp Ambassador, and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT) with 20+ years of experience designing and building Cloud & Enterprise systems. He has worked with companies of all sizes from startups to large enterprises. He has a passion for technology and sharing what he learns with others to help enable them to learn faster and be more productive.