Hi all, I am excited to share that Microsoft have made NVv4 VM now general available in US South Central and Europe West regions.

I have been testing the NVv4 in Azure US South Central and West Europe for some months and performance is simply amazing. I am very excited Azure finally have GPU-P in production now and customers can benefits of having SR-IOV lowering the bar of enabling your virtual machine instance in Azure with GPU capability.

Customers who are doing EUC such as Microsoft WVD/RDS, Citrix CVAD, VMware Horizon, Nutanix XIframe, Parallels RAS, Teradici can now benefit of these new GPU instances in Azure. I highly recommend doing a POC to see benefit of these instance.

I will in this blogpost cover what is the new NVv4 instance and how to choose an instance and install and what the price is.

Enjoy /Thomas Poppelgaard

The NVv4-series virtual machines are powered by AMD Radeon Instinct MI25 GPUs and AMD EPYC 7V12(Rome) CPUs. With NVv4-series Azure is introducing virtual machines with partial GPUs. Pick the right sized virtual machine for GPU accelerated graphics applications and virtual desktops starting at 1/8th of a GPU with 2 GiB frame buffer to a full GPU with 16 GiB frame buffer. NVv4 virtual machines currently support only Windows guest operating system.

NVv4 Virtual Machines support up to 32 vCPUs, 112GB of RAM, and 16 GB of GPU memory.

With AMD hardware-based GPU virtualization solution built on top of AMD MxGPU and industry standard SR-IOV technology, customers can securely run workloads on virtual GPUs with dedicated GPU frame buffer.

Premium Storage: Supported

Premium Storage caching: Supported

Live Migration: Not Supported

Memory Preserving Updates: Not Supported

Overview which NVv4 instance type you can provisioning in Azure

Size vCPU Memory: GiB Temp storage (SSD) GiB GPU GPU memory: GiB Max data disks Max NICs Standard_NV4as_v4 4 14 88 1/8 2 4 2 Standard_NV8as_v4 8 28 176 1/4 4 8 4 Standard_NV16as_v4 16 56 352 1/2 8 16 8 Standard_NV32as_v4 32 112 704 1 16 32

1 NVv4-series VMs feature AMD Simultaneous multithreading Technology

Supported operating systems and drivers

To take advantage of the GPU capabilities of Azure NVv4-series VMs running Windows, AMD GPU drivers must be installed.

OS Driver Windows 10 EVD – Build 1903



Windows 10 – Build 1809



Windows Server 2016



Windows Server 2019 20.Q1.1 (.exe)

Driver installation

Connect by Remote Desktop to each NVv4-series VM. If you are a NVv4 preview customer then please stop the VM and wait for it to move to Stopped(Deallocated) state. Please start the VM and then uninstall the preview driver by running “amdcleanuputility-x64.exe” located at the folder “…\AMDCleanUninstallUtility”. The exact path will vary based on where the previous driver installation files are. Download and install the latest driver. Reboot the VM.

Verify driver installation

You can verify driver installation in Device Manager. The following example shows successful configuration of the Radeon Instinct MI25 card on an Azure NVv4 VM.



You can use dxdiag to verify the GPU display properties including the video RAM. The following example shows a 1/8th partition of the Radeon Instinct MI25 card on an Azure NVv4 VM.

GPU driver for NVv4

AMD Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 is available from Azure but can also be downloaded here from AMD.

NVv4 supports following APIs

OpenGL 4.6

OpenCL™ 2.0

DirectX® 12.0

Vulkan® 1.1

Prices for NVv4 in West Europe

Add to

estimate Instance Core RAM Temporary

storage GPU Pay as you go with AHB 1 year reserved with

AHB

(% Savings) 3 year reserved with

AHB

(% Savings) Spot with AHB

(% Savings) NV4as v4 4 14 GiB 88 GiB 1/8th MI25 (2GB VRAM) $0.116/hour – – – – $0.0464/hour(~60%) NV8as v4 8 28 GiB 176 GiB 1/4th MI25 (4GB VRAM) $0.233/hour – – – – $0.0932/hour(~60%) NV16as v4 16 56 GiB 352 GiB 1/2 MI25 (8GB VRAM) $0.466/hour – – – – $0.1864/hour(~60%) NV32as v4 32 112 GiB 700 GiB 1x MI25 (16GB VRAM) $0.932/hour – – – – $0.3728/hour(~60%)

Prices for NVv4 in US South Central

Add to

estimate Instance Core RAM Temporary

storage GPU Pay as you go with AHB 1 year reserved with

AHB

(% Savings) 3 year reserved with

AHB

(% Savings) Spot with AHB

(% Savings) NV4as v4 4 14 GiB 88 GiB 1/8th MI25 (2GB VRAM) $0.116/hour – – – – $0.0464/hour(~60%) NV8as v4 8 28 GiB 176 GiB 1/4th MI25 (4GB VRAM) $0.233/hour – – – – $0.0932/hour(~60%) NV16as v4 16 56 GiB 352 GiB 1/2 MI25 (8GB VRAM) $0.466/hour – – – – $0.1864/hour(~60%) NV32as v4 32 112 GiB 700 GiB 1x MI25 (16GB VRAM) $0.932/hour – – – – $0.3728/hour(~60%)

Source

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/nvv4-series



https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/power-your-azure-gpu-workstations-with-flexible-gpu-partitioning/