VM Offerings in Azure Modeling and Simulation Workbench

Azure Modeling and Simulation Workbench offers a select set of virtual machines (VM) optimized for large, complex modeling and simulation workloads, semiconductor design, and other scientific or industrial workloads.

This article provides an overview of the Azure VM families that are available in Modeling and Simulation Workbench. A summary of the series, common and optimal workloads, and additional information can help you choose the best VM for your scenario.

Quotas

VM quotas in Modeling and Simulation Workbench are handled differently than in traditional Azure VM offerings. Modeling and Simulation Workbench operates in a Microsoft managed environment, therefore VM quotas aren't directly associated with the owner's Azure subscription. Quota requests should be sent through your Microsoft account manager.

General purpose

General purpose VM sizes provide balanced CPU-to-memory ratio. Ideal for testing and development, small to medium databases, and low to medium traffic web servers. They make ideal management VMs for managing chambers, Facilitating file imports or exports, compiling applications, or installing applications to shared storage.

Dv4-series

The 'D' family of VM sizes are one of Azure's general purpose VM sizes. They're designed for a range of demanding workloads, such as enterprise applications, web and application servers, development and test environments, and batch processing tasks. They're favored for running enterprise-grade applications, supporting moderate to high-traffic web servers, and performing data-intensive batch processing.

The Dv4 run on Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8473C (Sapphire Rapids), Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake), or Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake) processors in a hyper-threaded configuration, providing a better value proposition for most general-purpose workloads. Dv4 series don't have local storage.

View the Dv4 family page

Size Name vCPUs (Qty.) Memory (GB) Max Bandwidth (Mbps)
Standard_D2_v4 2 8 5000
Standard_D4_v4 4 16 10000
Standard_D8_v4 8 32 12500
Standard_D16_v4 16 64 12500
Standard_D32_v4 32 128 16000
Standard_D48_v4 48 192 24000
Standard_D64_v4 64 256 30000

Compute optimized

Compute optimized VM sizes have a high CPU-to-memory ratio. These sizes are good for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes, application servers, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workloads.

Fsv2-series

The Fsv2-series run on the 3rd Generation Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake), the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8272CL (Cascade Lake) processors, or the Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8168 (Skylake) processors. It features a sustained all core Turbo clock speed of 3.4 GHz and a maximum single-core turbo frequency of 3.7 GHz. Intel® AVX-512 instructions are new on Intel Scalable Processors. These instructions provide up to a 2X performance boost to vector processing workloads on both single and double precision floating point operations. Fsv2-series VMs feature Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology.

Fsv2-series have fixed-sized local storage.

View the Fsv2 family page

Size vCPUs Memory: GiB Temp storage (SSD) GiB Expected network bandwidth (Mbps)
Standard_F16s_v2 16 32 128 12500
Standard_F32s_v2 32 64 256 16000
Standard_F48s_v2 48 96 384 21000
Standard_F64s_v2 64 128 512 28000
Standard_F72s_v2 72 144 576 30000

FX-series

The FX-series runs on the Intel® Xeon® Gold 6246R (Cascade Lake) processors. It features an all-core-turbo frequency of 4.0 GHz, 21 GB RAM per vCPU, up to 1 TB total RAM, and local temporary storage. The FX-series will benefit workloads that require a high CPU clock speed and high memory to CPU ratio, workloads with high per-core licensing costs, and applications requiring a high single-core performance. A typical use case for FX-series is the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workload. FX-series VMs feature Intel® Turbo Boost Technology 2.0, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology, and Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (Intel® AVX-512).

Size Name vCPUs (Qty.) Memory (GB) Temp Disk Size (GiB) Temp Disk Random Read (RR) IOPS Temp Disk Random Read (RR) Speed (MBps)
Standard_FX4mds 4 84 168 40000 343
Standard_FX12mds 12 252 504 100000 1029
Standard_FX24mds 24 504 1008 200000 2057
Standard_FX36mds 36 756 1512 300000 3086
Standard_FX48mds 48 1008 2016 400000 3871

View the FX-series family page

Memory optimized

Memory optimized VM sizes offer a high memory-to-CPU ratio that is great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics.

Esv5-series

Esv5-series virtual machines run on Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8473C (Sapphire Rapids), or Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake) processor reaching an all core turbo clock speed of up to 3.5 GHz. Esv5-series virtual machines don't have temporary storage.

View the Esv5 family page

Size vCPU (Qty.) Memory: GiB Max bandwidth (Mbps)
Standard_E2s_v5 2 16 12500
Standard_E4s_v5 4 32 12500
Standard_E8s_v5 8 64 12500
Standard_E16s_v5 16 128 12500
Standard_E20s_v5 20 160 12500
Standard_E32s_v5 32 256 16000
Standard_E48s_v5 48 384 24000
Standard_E64s_v5 64 512 30000
Standard_E96s_v5 96 672 35000

M family

The 'M' family of VM size series are one of Azure's ultra memory-optimized VM instances. They're designed for memory-intensive workloads, such as large in-memory databases, data warehousing, and high-performance computing (HPC). The M-family is equipped with substantial RAM capacities and high vCPU capabilities, M-family VMs support applications and services that require massive amounts of memory and significant computational power. This makes them well-suited for handling tasks like real-time data processing, complex scientific simulations, and large-scale enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, ensuring peak performance for the most demanding data-centric applications.

M-series VMs have fixed-size temporary storage.

View the M series page

Size vCPU Memory: GiB Temp storage (SSD) GiB Expected network bandwidth (Mbps)
Standard_M64s 64 1024 2048 16000
Standard_M128s 128 2048 4096 30000
Standard_M64m 64 1792 7168 16000
Standard_M128m 128 3892 14336 32000

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