Microsoft is announcing the preview of the new DCa/ECa v6 series AMD based confidential virtual machines (VMs) running on 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors with Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP) security features. These VMs benefit from hardware-based encryption ensuring memory written by your VM can only be read or rewritten by your VM. You can migrate your workloads to these VMs without making changes to your code.
These confidential VMs are designed to offer a hardware-based and attested trusted execution environment (TEE) leveraging AMD SEV-SNP, which hardens guest protections to deny the hypervisor and other host management code access to VM memory and state and can protect against operator access. Keys used for VM memory encryption are generated by a dedicated secure processor inside of the CPU and cannot be read from software.
These VMs consist of our new general purpose DCasv6-series and our new memory optimized ECasv6-series VMs. They offer better performance and better price-performance than our previous generation AMD based confidential VMs, making them an attractive option for a wide range of workloads that involve the processing of sensitive data such as PII and PHI
Many workloads will benefit from improvements over the previous generation of AMD based confidential VMs with up to 80% better remote storage performance and up to 20% networking bandwidth improvement.
Learn more.