Microsoft has released new VM sizes for Microsoft Azure Virtual Machines and Web/Worker roles. The new VM sizes are called D-Series offering up to 112 GB in memory with compute processors that are approximately 60 percent faster than the A-Series VM sizes. D-Series have up to 800 GB of local SSD disk allowing for fast reads and writes. Microsoft has updated its Virtual Machine pricing details page to reflect the new offering.
The new sizes are defined as follows:
On these new sizes, the temporary drive (D:\ on Windows, /mnt or /mnt/resource on Linux) are local SSDs. One use case is to use SQL 2014 Buffer Pool Extensions (BPE) which improves read latency of database workloads.