-: Welcome to the Data Center Innovation session.
I am Andy Vargas, vice president and general manager
of the Microsoft Technology Center at Intel.
For those of you who do not know,
MTC is a group of software technical experts at Intel
that collaborate with Microsoft to define, develop,
and deliver new technologies and experiences
across IoT, client, and data center.
We have an engineering partnership
that goes back over 25 years.
Today, we will go over what's new in the data center
from Intel and Microsoft.
In this session, Joe Sherman,
principal group program manager,
will be joining me to highlight
some of the co-engineering investments
we have been closely working on.
Earlier in the keynote,
I noted the public preview of DCsv3 is now available.
At Microsoft Ignite, it was announced that the Dv5, Ev5
for general purpose VMs,
built on Intel's 3rd generation
Intel Xeon Scalable processors are now GA.
We're really excited with the performance potential
of these new VMs.
These new VMs will deliver up to 15% increased performance
and better price to performance gen over gen.
-: That's right, Andy.
Microsoft continues to collaborate
with our technology partners like Intel
to embed the latest innovations in Azure IaaS.
Customers have come to expect
continued price performance improvements from the cloud,
and we intend to continuously improve our capabilities.
The new Dv5 Virtual Machines
target many general purpose workloads,
like eCommerce systems, web frontends,
and desktop virtualization solutions.
The Ev5 Virtual Machines are specifically engineered
to tackle memory intensive workloads
like in-memory business analytics
and other business critical applications.
We have increased the memory and virtual CPU counts
for greater performance and scalability.
Not all workloads are the same.
Therefore adjusting VCPUs to memory ratios,
among other factors,
can make a difference in the overall performance
of the application.
We see that, in fact, in various scenarios.
Take, for example, the data-intensive workloads.
Storage throughput becomes especially important
when our customers deploy mission-critical OLTP applications
that require a large number of disk storage operations.
For these customer scenarios,
we have announced at Ignite
the preview of the Ebv5 Azure Virtual Machines.
A new memory optimized VM series
that delivers up to 300% increased
remote storage performance,
these new VMs offer up to 120,000 operations per second
and 4,000 megabytes per second
of remote disk storage throughput
and, of course, feature the latest Intel processors.
The increased storage throughput is ideal
for large relational databases.
Customers can also consolidate existing workloads
on fewer VMs or on smaller VM sizes,
and that can save costs.
-: On a related note,
Principal Technologies performed a series of benchmarks
that show some of the performance benefits
of the new VMs.
It showed that the new VMs processed the SQL Server workload
significantly faster than the older VMs.
It can be up to 1.27x as fast
for businesses utilizing mid-size VMs.
This benefit can enable you to find data insights
in less time and start using them
to improve your business sooner.
Another example includes Intel Software Guard Extensions
in the new DCsv3 VMs.
You can see an increase of 1500x in EPC Memory
and 12x in Regular Memory count.
These trusted execution environments
make it easier for customers to run enterprise workloads
and ensure their sensitive workloads are confidential.
Moving to another topic, Joe,
we have partnered a lot through numerous projects together.
One that I would like to bring up with you
is the investments on LAMP stack.
Can you tell us a bit more of what we're driving together?
Absolutely, we wanted to demonstrate
how Azure customers can benefit from the latest Dv5,
Ev5 Virtual Machines when running their applications
on Azure.
To do that, as an example,
we deployed a WordPress image on Azure managed solution.
This solution hosts a scalable WordPress
content management system server
and includes Azure components,
such as our Virtual Machine Scale Sets
running on the Intel Ice Lake-based Virtual Machines
I previously talked about
and the Azure File Share.
For our testing, we compared the performance
of WordPress running on Azure VMs,
specifically the Ddsv5 versus the Ddsv4 VM sizes,
each with four virtual CPUs.
And we stress-tested our WordPress website
to replicate traditional user behavior.
These workload categories need to execute a high volume
of HTTPS requests,
which in turn require encryption and decryption
of web traffic.
Given the characteristics of the workload,
we monitored performance across two key metrics,
average response time and throughput.
Also thanks to the built-in crypto acceleration
provided by the Intel Ice Lake processors,
the Dv5 series VMs delivered
a throughput performance increase of 58%
and a reduced average wait time of 55%
compared to the prior generation of Intel-based VMs.
This is a very positive indication
that the new Dv5, Ev5 series VMs
can offer significant performance improvements
for your workloads.
-: This is great.
These benchmarks are achieved through VM images
that Intel created in partnership with Bitnami.
The two VM images, one for NginX and one for WordPress,
make it easier for customers
to leverage the Ice Lake cryptographic acceleration benefits
into their LAMP stack server applications.
They are also affinitized to Ice Lake Dv5 VMs
and are available in the Azure Marketplace today
for you to try out.
I saw that there was a new tool available
that Microsoft announced at Ignite.
Can you talk a bit more about that?
-: Yes, as you can see,
the range of options of available to customers
to run their workloads on Azure keeps growing.
We recognize that a broadening portfolio
may be more difficult to navigate.
So we've introduced the Virtual Machines Selector,
which is a web-based tool to help customers simplify
and accelerate their VM selection process.
The Virtual Machine Selector ultimately identifies
the best Virtual Machine and disk storage
based on the requirements the customer enters.
You will then be able to view the prices
and add the selected VMs to the pricing calculator
as the next step.
Let's see it in action.
It's an easy way to find what you're looking for.
For example, you can find the Virtual Machine
based on the workload type.
You can drill into details of the individual workloads,
and then you can select the specs of the Virtual Machine
to match what you think you need.
If I click next, then I can start to look at other options
for my Virtual Machine.
I can select the disk storage needs.
Then if I click next again,
I can select the operating system and image I need.
I can select the region
where I want the Virtual Machines to be.
Finally, the selector tool will provide me
recommended Virtual Machines
and then give me a link to the pricing tool
where I can see what my recommended configuration is.
-: That's amazing.
The tools solve some of the challenges
that we have heard from customers
on figuring out the right VMs
based on their needs and budget.
Well, this wraps up our session today.
Thank you, Joe, it's been a pleasure
to have you be part of this session with me.
To learn more
about the latest 3rd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable Processors
and the Azure VM Selector Tool,
check out these links.