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Azure VM sizes and storage.

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Now, before the days of virtualization,

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it could be quite a pain to upgrade hardware on your hardware hosts.

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And frankly, I know even in 2022 that can be a pain,

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but virtualization helps because we can go through the pains of

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hardware upgrade once on our Hyper‑V host,

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and then adjust the CPU storage, network,

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and memory on those VMs pretty dynamically.

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Well, we can do the same thing in Azure, but it operates a bit differently.

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The Azure VM image library is actually sized,

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that is,

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we have different balances between CPU memory and then other

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properties that come into Azure VM sizes are the maximum

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number of data disks you can have, the input‑output operations per second,

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whether you can do premium storage, what kind of temp storage you have,

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how much solid‑state temp storage you get,

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whether or not the Azure VM can support features like nested virtualization.

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These are all rolled into Azure VM sizes.

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And there's also a relative performance metric that Microsoft uses

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for VMs in Azure called the Azure Compute Unit.

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You can check the exercise files if you want to read more details on it,

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but, of course,

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we're never going to get within miles or kilometers of an Azure data center,

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and you're not going to know exactly from VM to VM,

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what the host's hardware configuration is.

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So to counteract that, Microsoft has a series of standardized measurement units.

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And again, the one that's used with VMs is ACU.

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The more ACUs, the more expensive per minute it will cost to run that Azure VM,

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but you'll get more performance.

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The Azure VM sizes are divided into types,

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and these all represent different balancings between vCPU,

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RAM, and so on.

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General‑purpose is truly balanced between CPU and memory,

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compute is skewed towards processor, memory is skewed towards memory,

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there's storage optimized for data‑intensive workloads,

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graphical processor unit weighted sizes for if you're doing

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video rendering and that kind of stuff,

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and there's a high‑performance compute for super high speed,

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high priority processing.

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You'll also see that these Azure VM sizes are versioned.

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For instance, they're denoted in a special syntax like DSv2,

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DSv3, and as you can expect, the higher the version number,

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the more features.

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V3 is a pretty good cut‑off to indicate nested virtualization support,

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but as always, you'll want to consult the docs.

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The B series are burstable, the 2 means 2 processor cores,

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m means memory‑optimized.

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So there is a logic or a rubric behind how Microsoft chooses these VM names.

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Basically, it's family, sub‑family, the number of vCPUs,

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special features, and then version.

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Microsoft has an entire Docs article on describing

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how they name their Azure VMs.

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I would suggest that you look at the exercise files,

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not necessarily for exam purposes,

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because you don't have to memorize these details for your exam, but you do definitely need to understand how to change and Azure VM size.