All You Need to Know About Azure VM

Table of Contents

What is a Virtual Machine?
Uses of Virtual Machines
What is an Azure VM?
Types of Azure Virtual Machines
Benefits of using VM

In today’s cloud computing era, the Azure Virtual Machines are becoming more popular among IT Infrastructure. It has acquired great importance in the IT sector by providing the best visualization technology with its advantages. This comprehensive blog is designed to know all about Azure Virtual Machine. But before going into the core concepts of Windows Virtual Machine in Azure, let’s check out what is meant by virtual machine and its uses.

What is a Virtual Machine?

A Virtual Machine (VM) is a virtual source that functions as a computer system with its CPU, Storage, Memory, and Network Interface like other physical computers like laptops, smartphones, or servers.

While the hardware parts of a traditional computer are physical and tangible, VMs are virtual software-defined computers within physical servers, existing only as a code. This software, known as Hypervisor, separates the machine resources from the hardware to use as virtual machines.

Uses of Virtual Machines

The following are the uses of Virtual Machines:

• It helps to develop and deploy an application to the cloud.
• It helps run software or applications on operating systems that are not intended by nature.
• It enables you to work on a new operating system, which includes beta releases.
• It creates a new environment to make it easier for developers to run and deploy applications.
• It helps to backup your existing Operating System.
• It can install an existing Operating System to access the virus-infected data.

What is an Azure VM?

Azure Virtual Machines is an on-demanding computer resource developed by Microsoft Azure. It is based on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), in which the users can take control over the environment to establish the host environment.

Azure Virtual Machine offers the flexibility of virtualization with an in-build computer system designed based on the virtualization concept, which is similar to the cloud-platform-virtualization. It helps to deploy, configure, patch, install and run the software as we perform on computer systems. It also helps create SQL databases, Linux Virtual Machines, Directory domain services, Application Services, etc.

Types of Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machine can work on five operating systems (Windows, RHEL, CentOS, Ubuntu, and SUSE). Some features are region-specific, guaranteed to find an Azure VM to match the workload irrespective of the region.

Various types of Azure Virtual Machine are configured to perform specific tasks required to compute, memory, or storage abilities. Each kind has a distinct CPU relying on the nature of the workload used to support workloads with additional features.

• A-Series (Entry-level Virtual Machines)

Entry-level VMs are economical and contain CPU performance and memory configuration that provides a basic level of workloads such as small to medium databases, low traffic web servers, code repositories, servers for proofs-of-concept, and development and test servers.

• Bs-Series (Economical Burstable Virtual Machines)

Economical Burstable VMs are the same as A-Series VMs. They can run at a low to moderate baseline CPU utilization, but it requires to burst to high CPU utilization when demand rises.

• D-Series (General-purpose VMs) 

General-purpose VMs contain a one vCPU-to-4 GiB memory ratio and are best suitable for testing and development, from small- to medium-sized databases and web servers that undergo low to mid-volume traffic.

• E-Series (Optimized for in-memory applications)

E-Series VMs are optimized for in-memory applications such as SAP HANA. These are best suited for memory-intensive enterprise applications, in-memory analytics workloads, sizable relational database servers, etc.

•  F-Series (Compute-optimized VMs)

Compute-optimized VMs contain a one vCPU-to-2 GiB memory ratio suitable for application servers, network appliances, batch processes, and web servers that receive a higher traffic volume.

• G-Series (Memory and Storage Optimized Virtual Machines)

G-Series VMs have two times more memory and four times more SSD than D-Series VMs. It contains ½ TB of RAM and 32 CPU cores, providing unparalleled performance, memory, and local SSD storage capacity.

•  H-Series (High performance compute)

The high-performance compute Azure Virtual Machine types can be optimized for workloads for dense computation (i.e., reservoir simulation or weather modeling). Generally, they contain vCPU-to-memory ratios of 7x, but they can deploy and maintain high-performance compute VMs up to 14x ratio.

• Ls-Series (Storage-optimized VMs) 

Storage optimized VMs contain a one vCPU-to-8 GiB ratio with a high disk to reduce latency. Hence, they are expensive to run for SQL and NoSQL databases, data warehousing, large transactional databases, and Big Data.

• M-Series (Memory-optimized VMs) 

Memory-optimized VMs include a customized memory ratio that starts at 1 vCPU-to-8 GiB but goes up to 1 vCPU-to-28 GiB memory for extreme memory-optimized VMs. There are 93 memory-optimized VMs based on workloads, such as relational database servers and in-memory analytics.

• Mv2-Series (Largest memory-optimized virtual machines)

The Mv2-series VMs are hyper-threaded, which offers over 416 vCPU on a single VM and 3TB, 6TB, and 12TB memory configurations. It provides unparalleled computational performance to support a large in-memory database.

• N-Series (VMs for Graphics Processing (GPUs)) 

GPU Azure Virtual Machine type is best suitable for heavy graphic rendering and video editing workloads. They can also be used for modern training and differencing with deep learning and can use either single or multiple GPUs.

Benefits of using VMs

Generally, the system infrastructure has its servers scattered here and there. Sometimes it is difficult for the users to connect through a VPN or premises to access any system. But Azure platform provides the same services that can be accessed from their servers from any part of the world using an internet connection. Because of their portability and flexibility, virtual machines offer tremendous benefits, such as:

• Accessibility: Azure VMs are accessible to any internet-connected device in no time.
• Scalability: When the demand increases, the system and memory storage capacity can be increased accordingly to meet the requirements.
• Customized Controls: Users can customize the controls based on the Data volumes.
• Storage: Users can utilize different storage options like public storage, private storage, or both based on the employed data.
• Tools: The inbuilt tools that can help users optimize and save the time of the process.
• Security: Azure VMS system includes different encryption options with customizable measures to maintain data security.

Final Words

Azure Virtual Machine revolutionized the cloud service and ensured applications hosted in Azure with zero downtime architecture that helps its customers avail exclusive benefits. It is the right choice to deploy the cloud-based solution with Azure Virtual Machine to avoid challenges that might occur while using an extensive infrastructure.

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AUTHOR
Emaliya Keerthana
Content Writer

“ Emaliya Keerthana working as a Content Writer at InfosecTrain. She likes to explore the latest technology. She writes on emerging IT-related topics and is passionate about sharing her thoughts through blogs. “