Before I start on the topic at hand, I’d like to acknowledge the inspirator for this small post, Herman Keijzer, working at Microsoft. Thanks mate!

Now, where is all the fuss about? This week Microsoft released another new family of Virtual Machines in Preview into their ever growing population of IaaS services; the B-series Virtual Machines. Where “normal” Virtual Machines in Azure rely on your action (automated or manual) to save money, these Virtual Machines are intelligent enough to “slow down” when they’re not used to maximum capacity. But, when you’ve chosen the right VM, it can also burst to 100% of chosen capacity for your burstable workloads, hence the B-Series…
When re-sizing the normal VM’s Azure, often you will experience downtime, and saving money with your VM’s inclines down-time, since you’ll shut them down to save money.

So how does this work? While your vm’s aren’t running at capacity, meaning full blown processor power and memory commit, you’ll start to collect “credits”, these credits are used in times when you need the power at peak moments. Fine examples for these workloads could be: web-servers, file- and printservers, domain controllers and the license server in an RDS farm.

The size chart for these vm’s looks like this, courtesy of Corey Sanders’ blog:

The machines are currently available in four regions: US – West 2, US – East, Europe – West, and Asia Pacific – Southeast. More regions will be coming ‘later this year’

For more information check out the blog by Corey Sanders, mentioned earlier:

https://azure.microsoft.com/nl-nl/blog/introducing-b-series-our-new-burstable-vm-size/

and the documentation on Azure.com

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/linux/sizes-general#b-series-preview

Until next time, take care!

One Comment

  • rama says:

    whoah this blog is wonderful i really like reading your articles. Keep up the great paintings! You realize, a lot of people are hunting round for this info, you could help them greatly.

Leave a Reply