Azure VM Sizes & What They Are Best Suited For

List of the different VM sizes:

Azure VM Series	Type	Best Suited For
A-series Av2, Amv2	General Purpose	development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small to medium databases, proof-of-concepts, and code repositories.
B-series	General Purpose	development and test servers, low-traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers; for workloads that do not need the full performance of the CPU continuously
D-series D, Dv2, DSv2, Dv3, DSv3 (Hyper-Threaded), DC	General Purpose	enterprise-grade applications, relational databases, in-memory caching, and analytics. DC series instances enable customers to build secure enclave-based applications to protect their code and data while it’s in use.
Dv2-series 11-15, DSv2-series 11-15	Memory optimized	enterprise-grade applications that demand faster vCPUs, better temporary storage performance, or have higher memory demands.
E-series Ev3, Esv3 (hyper-threaded)	Memory optimized	most general purpose workloads
F-series Fsv2 (Hyper-Threaded)	Compute optimized	VM sizes have a high CPU-to-memory ratio and are good for medium traffic web servers, network appliances, batch processes, and application servers.
G-Series	Memory optimized	ideal for enterprise-grade applications (like SAP HANA, SQL Server, Hadoop, DataZen, and Hortonworks) that demand faster vCPUs, better temporary storage performance, or have higher memory demands.
H-series	High performance compute	Azure  virtual machines (VMs) are designed to deliver leadership-class performance, MPI scalability, and cost efficiency for a variety of real-world HPC workloads. HB-series VMs are optimized for applications driven by memory bandwidth, such as fluid dynamics, explicit finite element analysis, and weather modeling. HC-series VMs are optimized for applications driven by dense computation, such as implicit finite element analysis, molecular dynamics, and computational chemistry.
L-series Ls, Lsv2 Lsv2	Storage optimized	High disk throughput and IO Ideal for Big Data, SQL, NoSQL databases, data warehousing and large transactional databases. Examples include Cassandra, MongoDB, Cloudera and Redis.
M-Series Mv2 (hyper-threaded)	Memory optimized	High memory-to-CPU ratio that are great for relational database servers, medium to large caches, and in-memory analytics. Mv2-Series is suitable for extremely large databases or other applications that benefit from high vCPU counts and large amounts of memory. M-series VMs are certified by SAP for SAP HANA OLTP and OLAP workloads.
N-Series	GPU optimized	GPU optimized VM sizes are specialized virtual machines available with single or multiple NVIDIA GPUs. These sizes are designed for compute-intensive, graphics-intensive, and visualization workloads. NC, NCv2, NCv3 sizes are optimized for compute-intensive and network-intensive applications and algorithms. Some examples are CUDA- and OpenCL-based applications and simulations, AI, and Deep Learning. ND, and NDv2 The ND-series is focused on training and inference scenarios for deep learning. NV and NVv3 sizes are optimized and designed for remote visualization, streaming, gaming, encoding, and VDI scenarios using frameworks such as OpenGL and DirectX.
S-Series SAP HANA on Azure Large Instances		purpose-built SAP HANA infrastructure with high-performance compute, storage, and network supporting up to 24TB RAM on a single node.

Quirky facts:

• B1ls is supported only on Linux
• If you want to get the best performance for your VMs, you should limit the number of data disks to 2 disks per vCPU.
• NC and NV VMs only support VM disks that are backed by Standard Disk Storage (HDD). NCv2, NCv3, ND, NDv2, and NVv2 VMs only support VM disks that are backed by Premium Disk Storage (SSD).
• Because of their specialized hardware, you can only resize compute-intensive instances within the same size family (H-series or compute-intensive A-series). For example, you can only resize an H-series VM from one H-series size to another. In addition, resizing from a non-compute-intensive size to a compute-intensive size is not supported.
• A subset of the compute-intensive instances (A8, A9, H16r, H16mr, HB and HC) feature a network interface for remote direct memory access (RDMA) connectivity. Selected N-series sizes designated with 'r' such as the NC24rs configurations (NC24rs_v2 and NC24rs_v3) are also RDMA-capable. This interface is in addition to the standard Azure network interface available to other VM sizes.
• HB-series & HC-series support Premium Storage
• Standard_DS15_v2, Standard_D15_v2, Standard_E64i_v3, Standard_E64is_v3, Standard_F72s_v2, Standard_M128ms - Instances are isolated to hardware dedicated to a single customer. These virtual machine sizes are best suited for workloads that require a high degree of isolation from other customers for workloads involving elements like compliance and regulatory requirements.
• L-series VMs are optimized to use the local disk on the node attached directly to the VM rather than using durable data disks
• A VM comes with a temporary disk (the D: drive on Windows) that is stored on a physical drive on the host machine. It is not saved in Azure Storage and may be deleted during reboots and other VM lifecycle events. Use this disk only for temporary data, such as page or swap files.