Microsoft has opened a public preview of two new memory-optimized Mdsv4 and Msv4 virtual machine series, built for SAP workloads and other jobs that need a lot of RAM per vCPU. The new series run on 6th generation Intel Xeon Scalable processors, ship with the latest Azure Boost networking and storage offload, and add a set of platform security features that the older M-series never got.
What these series are
Both Mdsv4 and Msv4 sit in the memory-optimized family, the line that historically carried SAP HANA on Azure. The “d” in Mdsv4 marks the variants that include local NVMe storage; the plain Msv4 sizes are memory-only. Microsoft’s announcement describes them as designed for demanding memory-intensive workloads, which in practice means in-memory databases, big analytics nodes, and the SAP S/4HANA estate most of these VMs end up hosting.
The headline change is the CPU. The 6th generation Intel Xeon 6 6500/6700 P-core processors give these VMs a noticeably higher memory ceiling than the previous generation, and Intel’s own material for Xeon 6 talks about scale-up configurations reaching up to 64 TB of memory. Azure and SAP have been working with Intel on Xeon 6 for a while now; at Ignite 2025 the companies announced CXL Flat Memory Mode in private preview on Azure M-series VMs, which decouples memory capacity scaling from compute scaling. The Mdsv4/Msv4 preview is the next visible step of that collaboration landing in a public SKU.
Sizes and pricing
The largest published sizes give a sense of where this family is headed. The m128dls-v4 offers 128 vCPUs and 1,946 GiB of RAM, roughly 15.2 GiB per vCPU, starting at about $16.64 per hour on demand. The m192dls-v4 goes up to 192 vCPUs and 3,072 GiB, about 16 GiB per vCPU, starting at roughly $26.27 per hour, or $5.25 per hour as a spot instance.
Those numbers put the series in the same territory as the current Mbv3 line, but with a newer CPU generation and, when it arrives, SAP certification for the exact configurations. Preview pricing is usually lower than the eventual GA price, and preview instances carry no SLA, so nobody should be moving a production HANA database onto these yet.
Security and Azure Boost
Microsoft’s update singles out “advanced security capabilities” alongside Azure Boost. Azure Boost offloads networking and storage I/O onto dedicated hardware, which frees host CPU cycles for the workload instead of packet handling. For an in-memory database doing constant checkpoint writes and log shipping, that offload matters more than it would on a web tier. Microsoft has been layering Boost across its newer VM families, and every recent generation has shipped with it as standard.
The security angle is deliberately vague in the announcement, but the pattern for Intel-based v4 series elsewhere in Azure has been support for confidential computing features and improved firmware protection. Expect specifics at general availability.
Context: the M-family is getting crowded
Azure’s memory-optimized lineage has grown fast. The original M-series arrived in 2016 on Intel Xeon with up to 4 TB of RAM but entirely remote storage. Mbv3 added AMD EPYC and Azure Boost in 2022. Mbv4, in preview since 2025, pairs AMD EPYC with local NVMe caching and claims up to 3.2x throughput gains on 8 KB random reads over Mbv3. Mdsv4 and Msv4 are the Intel side of that same generation, which means SAP architects now have an AMD-with-NVMe option and an Intel option to benchmark against each other instead of only the older Mbv3. Microsoft has not published cross-family SAP benchmark numbers, so the comparison remains theoretical until certified results land.
What it means for SAP teams
If you run SAP on Azure, the practical question is whether Mdsv4 or Msv4 changes your sizing math. A smaller instance with better memory per vCPU can sometimes replace a larger older-generation one, and the Xeon 6 generation brings per-core performance gains on top. For landscapes approaching the memory limits of Mbv3, the larger Mdsv4 sizes may be the first place to test scale-up headroom before considering a scale-out redesign.
Three things to check before committing:
- SAP certification for the specific VM sizes, which will not exist until GA.
- Region availability, since large SAP estates cluster in West Europe and Southeast Asia and new series usually start in a couple of US regions.
- Whether the preview prices translate into a real TCO win against your current Mbv3 bill once GA pricing lands.
Caveats
This is a preview announcement, not a launch. The Azure Updates entry is short on numbers, and Microsoft has not published SAP benchmark results for the series yet. Anyone who ran the earlier Mbv4 preview, which paired AMD EPYC processors with fast local NVMe for HANA caching, will remember that the interesting details arrived in the Microsoft Tech Community deep dives rather than in the RSS entry. The Mdsv4/Msv4 series will likely follow the same pattern.
Still, the direction is clear. Azure’s memory-optimized line is moving to Xeon 6, memory per vCPU is holding steady around 15 to 16 GiB, and the CXL work that started in private preview is working its way toward VMs that customers can actually buy. If you size SAP HANA systems for a living, this preview is worth 30 minutes in a sandbox region before the year ends.