Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines

Platform

Products

name: Azure Virtual Machines; category: self_service_root_or_administrator_virtual_machine; service model: On-demand Linux and Windows IaaS VMs with customer root or Administrator control, separately selected compute, managed disks, networking and software images. Current size types include general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, GPU accelerated, FPGA accelerated and high-performance-computing families across x86 and Arm processors.; billing options: pay-as-you-go consumption, Azure savings plan for compute on eligible meters, one-year or three-year Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, Spot capacity, Azure Hybrid Benefit on eligible licenses; availability boundary: Size, generation, architecture, disk, feature and zone availability vary by region and subscription quota. The directory benchmark uses current commercial-public-cloud retail meters rather than assuming every size exists everywhere., name: B-family burstable virtual machines; category: burstable_virtual_machine; service model: The B family is Azure's credit-based VM type. The benchmark Standard_B1ls exposes one vCPU and 0.5 GiB RAM, sustains a 5% CPU baseline, starts with 30 credits and can burst to 100% while credits remain; after exhaustion it is constrained to its baseline until credits accrue again.; benchmark boundary: Standard_B1ls is Linux-only and is the lowest current fully documented consumption VM with a matching commercial retail meter in 27 in-scope regions. It is absent from the current Denmark East retail catalog., name: Azure Spot Virtual Machines; category: interruptible_virtual_machine; service model: Discounted unused capacity for fault-tolerant workloads. Capacity is not guaranteed, Microsoft can evict the VM with 30 seconds' notice and Spot VMs have no SLA.; benchmark boundary: Spot prices and promotional/free-account credit are excluded from the recurring benchmark., name: Azure isolated VM sizes; category: single_vm_dedicated_physical_server; service model: Eligible isolated sizes guarantee that one customer VM is the only VM on the server. They have hardware-generation-limited lifetimes and carry an approximately 10% premium over the corresponding non-isolated size.; benchmark boundary: The guarantee is whole-server isolation, not a blanket claim that every Azure vCPU equals one dedicated physical core., name: Azure Dedicated Host; category: dedicated_physical_vm_host; service model: A physical server assigned to one Azure subscription. Customers place one or more supported Azure VMs or uniform scale-set instances on the host and control placement and maintenance scheduling within the supported host SKU.; benchmark boundary: Host SKUs, compatible VM series and regions vary. Host pricing is not converted into a fictitious per-VM offer., name: Azure confidential virtual machines; category: confidential_virtual_machine; service model: Eligible confidential VM sizes use hardware-backed trusted execution environments to encrypt data in use, including VM memory and processor state, and provide a dedicated virtual TPM. This protects guest confidentiality without implying a single-tenant physical host., name: Azure VMware Solution; category: dedicated_vmware_private_cloud; service model: Microsoft-managed private clouds containing VMware vSphere, vCenter Server, vSAN and NSX on dedicated bare-metal Azure infrastructure. Generation 1 connects through ExpressRoute; Generation 2 attaches dedicated AV64 hosts directly to an Azure Virtual Network and requires at least three hosts.; location and price boundary: Azure VMware Solution has its own generation- and SKU-specific regional matrix, minimum cluster and sales/capacity process. It is cataloged as a VM platform but is not reduced to a public single-VM benchmark., name: Commercial-cloud and non-VM boundary; category: scope_boundary; service model: This provider record covers Microsoft-operated commercial Azure public regions. Azure Government and Microsoft Azure operated by 21Vianet are separate eligibility, contracting and cloud partitions. Azure Local/Azure Stack deployments run on customer or partner premises and are not treated as Microsoft physical public-cloud locations. Azure Kubernetes Service, Container Instances, App Service and other managed runtimes are not mislabeled as customer root VMs; bare-metal services alone are outside the VM benchmark.

Operating systems

endorsed linux platform images: AlmaLinux, Azure Linux, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and 24.04 LTS, including eligible Ubuntu Pro variants, Debian 11 and 12, Flatcar Container Linux, Oracle Linux, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, including eligible SAP and HA variants, Rocky Linux from CIQ, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12 SP5, 15 SP5/SP6/SP7 and 16, including eligible SAP, support and BYOS variants; windows marketplace images: Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2022, Windows Server 2025, eligible Windows 10 and Windows 11 client images, eligible SQL Server images on Windows Server; other image paths: Microsoft and partner Marketplace images, community gallery images, private and shared Azure Compute Gallery images, customer-created or imported generalized and specialized images, compatible custom Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD images that meet Azure image requirements; generation: Azure supports eligible Hyper-V Generation 1 and Generation 2 images; Gen2 supplies UEFI and eligible trusted-launch capabilities.; licensing boundary: Image publisher plans, Windows, SQL Server, RHEL, SUSE and other commercial software can add license/support charges. The benchmark is the Linux base-compute meter and includes no paid image license.

Virtualization

standard azure vms: The Azure hypervisor system is based on Microsoft Hyper-V. Customer code runs in isolated child/guest partitions; the privileged root/host partition and hypervisor mediate hardware access.; azure vmware solution: VMware vSphere/ESXi, vCenter Server, vSAN and NSX on dedicated Azure bare-metal hosts.; guest access: Linux VMs provide customer root access and Windows VMs provide Administrator access subject to the selected image and customer IAM/network policy.; nested virtualization: Supported only on eligible VM sizes and configurations. The directory does not attribute nested virtualization to Standard_B1ls or Standard_D2ls_v5 without size-specific support.

CPU isolation

standard multitenant vms: shared physical infrastructure; Hyper-V isolation separates tenants, but an ordinary VM is not a dedicated server or physical core; benchmark b1ls: shared and burstable: one guest vCPU, 5% baseline, credit accumulation below baseline and bursts up to 100% while credits remain; benchmark d2ls v5: shared physical infrastructure; two vCPUs and 4 GiB RAM, with no B-series credit model; isolated vm sizes: one VM is guaranteed to be the only VM on its physical server; dedicated hosts: one physical server is assigned to one Azure subscription and may host multiple VMs belonging to that customer; confidential vms: hardware-backed encryption and isolation for data in use; not necessarily a single-tenant physical server; physical core boundary: Dedicated physical-core allocation is recorded only for a size whose current specification explicitly maps its vCPUs to full physical cores; no such claim is made for either benchmark size.; oversubscription ratio: not_found

Features

• App installation services: Microsoft Marketplace VM products, Azure VM Applications in Azure Compute Gallery, Azure VM extensions, cloud-init and custom data, Run Command and customer guest administration; capabilities: deploy preconfigured operating-system, application and virtual-appliance images from Marketplace, package, version, replicate, share and deploy applications or scripts to VMs and scale sets with VM Applications, perform post-deployment configuration and software installation with Windows or Linux extensions, run first-boot Linux configuration through cloud-init, install arbitrary compatible software with guest root or Administrator access; price boundary: Marketplace software plans and ancillary services can be separately charged and are not included in the benchmark.
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• Templates & images types: Marketplace, platform, community, custom, shared and imported VM images, versioned regional replicas in Azure Compute Gallery, generalized and specialized managed images, managed-disk snapshots and image versions, Azure VM Image Builder customization pipelines, Azure Resource Manager JSON templates and Bicep modules, Virtual Machine Scale Set VM profiles, cloud-init, custom data, extensions and VM Applications; interfaces: Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, Azure REST APIs and SDKs, ARM templates, Bicep, Terraform AzureRM provider
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• Network orchestration interfaces and tooling: Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, REST APIs and SDKs, ARM templates, Bicep, Terraform AzureRM provider; services: Azure Virtual Network IPv4/IPv6 address spaces, subnets, network interfaces, routes and peering, Public IP, NAT Gateway, VPN Gateway, ExpressRoute, Virtual WAN, Private Link and Azure Bastion where supported, Virtual Machine Scale Sets with Flexible or Uniform orchestration, health repair, rolling upgrades and manual, scheduled, metric or predictive autoscale, Azure Compute Fleet multi-SKU and multi-region capacity orchestration, availability zones, availability sets, proximity placement groups, capacity reservations and update controls; benchmark boundary: The benchmark includes no public IP, NAT, gateway, load balancer, cross-region transfer or internet egress.
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• Firewall services: name: Network security groups; scope: stateful Layer-4 allow or deny filtering on subnet or network-interface traffic by source, destination, protocol and port, name: Azure Firewall Basic, Standard and Premium; scope: separately provisioned, fully stateful managed firewall service; Standard adds L3-L7 filtering and threat intelligence, while Premium adds capabilities including IDPS and TLS inspection, name: Web Application Firewall; scope: Layer-7 web protection on eligible Application Gateway or Front Door deployments, name: Azure DDoS Protection; scope: optional enhanced network-layer DDoS protection beyond platform protections; benchmark boundary: No Azure Firewall, WAF or paid DDoS plan is included in the VM-and-disk estimate.
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• Load balancer services: name: Azure Load Balancer; scope: regional or cross-region Layer-4 TCP/UDP load balancing, name: Azure Application Gateway; scope: regional Layer-7 HTTP(S), TCP and TLS application delivery with routing, TLS termination, autoscale and optional WAF, name: Azure Front Door; scope: global Layer-7 application delivery, acceleration and failover, name: Azure Traffic Manager; scope: global DNS-based endpoint routing and failover, name: Gateway Load Balancer; scope: transparent service chaining to supported network virtual appliances; capabilities: health probes, public or private front ends where supported, zone-redundant and cross-region designs on eligible products, VM and scale-set backend pools; benchmark boundary: Load-balancing services and their public addresses/data processing are separately charged and omitted from the VM estimate.
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• DNS management services: Azure Public DNS, Azure Private DNS, Azure DNS Private Resolver, Azure Traffic Manager; capabilities: public authoritative DNS zones and records under customer-owned domains, private zones linked to virtual networks with optional VM record autoregistration, hybrid forwarding through Private Resolver endpoints and rulesets, DNSSEC for supported public zones and DNS-based load balancing through Traffic Manager, IPv4 and IPv6 reverse zones for customer-owned delegated ranges, PTR configuration for supported public IP addresses assigned by Azure; domain registration: not_applicable; Azure DNS hosts zones but is not a retail domain registrar; benchmark boundary: DNS zones, queries, Private Resolver and Traffic Manager are separate resources and not included in the VM estimate.
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• Git integrations services: Azure Pipelines, GitHub Actions for Azure, Azure Repos; providers: Azure Repos Git, GitHub, GitHub Enterprise Server, Bitbucket Cloud, other reachable Git repositories; capabilities: CI and pull-request validation for GitHub repositories through the Azure Pipelines GitHub App, OAuth or PAT connection, branch, tag, path, pull-request and scheduled pipeline triggers where the repository integration supports them, multi-repository checkout for supported repository resource types, GitHub Actions workflows that authenticate to Azure and build custom VM images or deploy Azure resources; price boundary: Azure DevOps parallel jobs, GitHub plans/runners and other pipeline resources have separate entitlements and are not included in VM compute.
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• Container registry services: Azure Container Registry, ACR Tasks, ACR Artifact Cache, Azure Kubernetes Service and other eligible Azure container consumers; artifacts: Docker images, OCI images and artifacts, Helm charts in OCI format; artifact cache upstreams: Docker Hub, Docker Hardened Images, Azure Container Registry, Microsoft Artifact Registry, AWS ECR Public Gallery, GitHub Container Registry, Quay, Kubernetes registry, Google Artifact Registry, legacy Google Container Registry, NVIDIA NGC, Red Hat authenticated and public registries; capabilities: push and pull with standard Docker-compatible clients and Microsoft Entra/RBAC authentication, import images and OCI artifacts from public registries, other ACR instances and supported non-Azure private registries without a local Docker daemon, build images on demand or from source/base-image/timer triggers with ACR Tasks, geo-replicate eligible Premium registries and proxy/cache supported upstream repositories, allow authorized VMs, scale sets, AKS and other runtimes to pull private images
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