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NC-series

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

Important

NC and NC_Promo series Azure virtual machines (VMs) will be retired on September 6, 2023. For more information, see the NC and NC_Promo retirement information. For how to migrate your workloads to other VM sizes, see the GPU compute migration guide.

This retirement announcement doesn't apply to NCv3, NCasT4v3 and NC A100 v4 series VMs.

NC-series VMs are powered by the NVIDIA Tesla K80 card and the Intel Xeon E5-2690 v3 (Haswell) processor. Users can crunch through data faster by using CUDA for energy exploration applications, crash simulations, ray traced rendering, deep learning, and more. The NC24r configuration provides a low latency, high-throughput network interface optimized for tightly coupled parallel computing workloads.

Premium Storage: Not Supported
Premium Storage caching: Not Supported
Live Migration: Not Supported
Memory Preserving Updates: Not Supported
VM Generation Support: Generation 1
Accelerated Networking: Not Supported
Ephemeral OS Disks: Not Supported
Nvidia NVLink Interconnect: Not Supported
Nested Virtualization: Not Supported

Size vCPU Memory: GiB Temp storage (SSD) GiB GPU GPU memory: GiB Max data disks Max NICs
Standard_NC6 6 56 340 1 12 24 1
Standard_NC12 12 112 680 2 24 48 2
Standard_NC24 24 224 1440 4 48 64 4
Standard_NC24r* 24 224 1440 4 48 64 4

1 GPU = one-half K80 card.

*RDMA capable

Supported operating systems and drivers

To take advantage of the GPU capabilities of Azure N-series VMs, NVIDIA GPU drivers must be installed.

The NVIDIA GPU Driver Extension installs appropriate NVIDIA CUDA or GRID drivers on an N-series VM. Install or manage the extension using the Azure portal or tools such as Azure PowerShell or Azure Resource Manager templates. See the NVIDIA GPU Driver Extension documentation for supported operating systems and deployment steps. For general information about VM extensions, see Azure virtual machine extensions and features.

If you choose to install NVIDIA GPU drivers manually, see N-series GPU driver setup for Windows or N-series GPU driver setup for Linux for supported operating systems, drivers, installation, and verification steps.

Size table definitions

  • Storage capacity is shown in units of GiB or 1024^3 bytes. When you compare disks measured in GB (1000^3 bytes) to disks measured in GiB (1024^3) remember that capacity numbers given in GiB may appear smaller. For example, 1023 GiB = 1098.4 GB.

  • Disk throughput is measured in input/output operations per second (IOPS) and MBps where MBps = 10^6 bytes/sec.

  • Data disks can operate in cached or uncached modes. For cached data disk operation, the host cache mode is set to ReadOnly or ReadWrite. For uncached data disk operation, the host cache mode is set to None.

  • To learn how to get the best storage performance for your VMs, see Virtual machine and disk performance.

  • Expected network bandwidth is the maximum aggregated bandwidth allocated per VM type across all NICs, for all destinations. For more information, see Virtual machine network bandwidth.

    Upper limits aren't guaranteed. Limits offer guidance for selecting the right VM type for the intended application. Actual network performance will depend on several factors including network congestion, application loads, and network settings. For information on optimizing network throughput, see Optimize network throughput for Azure virtual machines. To achieve the expected network performance on Linux or Windows, you may need to select a specific version or optimize your VM. For more information, see Bandwidth/Throughput testing (NTTTCP).

Other sizes and information

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For more information on disk types, see What disk types are available in Azure?

Next steps

Learn more about how Azure compute units (ACU) can help you compare compute performance across Azure SKUs.