Today Microsoft announced a new series of VM’s on Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Web/Worker Roles… These VM’s received the mysterious name of “D-series”. When you’re in need of pure cloud-performance, you’ll need one of these machines with up to 800GB of local SSD capacity.
The new sizes come in 2 flavours, General Purpose and High Memory and size as follows:
General Purpose
| Name | vCores | Memory (GB) | Local SSD (GB) |
| Standard_D1 | 1 | 3.5 | 50 |
| Standard_D2 | 2 | 7 | 100 |
| Standard_D3 | 4 | 14 | 200 |
| Standard_D4 | 8 | 28 | 400 |
High Memory
| Name | vCores | Memory (GB) | Local SSD (GB) |
| Standard_D11 | 2 | 14 | 100 |
| Standard_D12 | 4 | 28 | 200 |
| Standard_D13 | 8 | 56 | 400 |
| Standard_D14 | 16 | 112 | 800 |
On these new sizes (D-series) the temporary drive (D:\ on Windows-based vm’s) are local SSD’s. This can be utilized for workloads like local and temporary cache, like SQL Server 2014’s Buffer Pool Extensions.
Please note that the data on these drives are not guaranteed to be persisent, like the data on your OS disk or on any attached disks that persist in Azure Storage.
The new D-Series can be created through the portal or with Powershell, whichever you like best. In the new Azure portal, you will also receive an indication on monthly costs.
Currently not all regions support the new D-series of services and vm’s, but I’m sure Microsoft will try it’s best to ensure that these highly potent machines will be widely available very soon!
Source: Microsoft Azure BLOG
