'HX' sub-family storage optimized VM size series

Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets ✔️ Uniform scale sets

The 'HX' family of VM size series are one of Azure's high-memory, high-performance computing (HPC) optimized VM instances. They're built for tasks that need a lot of memory and strong CPU power. Examples include in-memory databases, big data analysis, and advanced scientific simulations. HX-series VMs, equipped with expansive memory and powerful CPUs, delivers the resources to efficiently handle large datasets and perform rapid data processing. They work well for financial services, scientific research, and business planning. These areas need real-time handling of large amounts of data to stay efficient and drive new ideas.

Workloads and use cases

In-Memory Databases: HX-series VMs are excellent for hosting in-memory databases like SAP HANA, which require extensive memory to maintain large datasets in RAM for ultra-fast processing and access.

Big Data Analytics: They can handle big data analytics applications that need to process vast amounts of data in memory to speed up analysis, which is critical for real-time decision-making.

Genomic Research: Genomics research often involves large-scale data analysis, where high memory capacity can significantly enhance performance by allowing more of the dataset to be held in memory, speeding up the analysis.

Financial Simulations: Banks use HX-series VMs for fast trading and risk checks. These systems process huge amounts of data quickly to predict stock trends and figure out credit risks right away.

ERP Systems: HX-series VMs offer plenty of memory and strong processing power. Large business systems rely on these features to manage large amounts of data and keep many users working at once.

Series in family

HB-series

HX-series VMs are optimized for workloads that require significant memory capacity with twice the memory capacity as HBv4. For example, workloads such as silicon design can use HX-series VMs to enable EDA customers targeting the most advanced manufacturing processes to run their most memory-intensive workloads.

HX VMs feature up to 176 AMD EPYC™ 9V33X ("Genoa-X") CPU cores with AMD's 3D V-Cache, clock frequencies up to 3.7 GHz, and no simultaneous multithreading. HX-series VMs also provide 1408 GB of RAM, 2.3 GB L3 cache. The 2.3 GB L3 cache per VM can deliver up to 5.7 TB/s of bandwidth to amplify up to 780 GB/s of bandwidth from DRAM, for a blended average of 1.2 TB/s of effective memory bandwidth across a broad range of customer workloads. The VMs also provide up to 12 GB/s (reads) and 7 GB/s (writes) of block device SSD performance.

All HX-series VMs feature 400 Gb/s NDR InfiniBand from NVIDIA Networking to enable supercomputer-scale MPI workloads. These VMs are connected in a non-blocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. NDR continues to support features like Adaptive Routing and the Dynamically Connected Transport (DCT). This newest generation of InfiniBand also brings greater support for offload of MPI collectives, optimized real-world latencies due to congestion control intelligence, and enhanced adaptive routing capabilities. These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is recommended.

View the full HX-series page.

Other size information

List of all available sizes: Sizes

Pricing Calculator: Pricing Calculator

Information on Disk Types: Disk Types

Next steps

Take advantage of the latest performance and features available for your workloads by changing the size of a virtual machine.

Utilize Microsoft's in-house designed ARM processors with Azure Cobalt VMs.

Learn how to Monitor Azure virtual machines.