HC sizes series

Important

Azure Virtual Machines HC-series sizes (Standard_HC44rs, Standard_HC44-16rs, Standard_HC44-32rs) will be retired on May 31, 2027. After this date, any remaining HC-series VMs will be deallocated, stop running, and will no longer incur charges. HC-series will no longer have SLA or support following retirement. Sales of 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances for HC-series ended on April 2, 2026. For more information, see Migrate your HC-series virtual machines by May 31, 2027.

HC-series Virtual Machine (VM)s are built for heavy computing tasks. They handle jobs like analyzing complex structures, studying how molecules behave, and running advanced chemistry simulations. HC VMs feature 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 processor cores, 8 GB of RAM per CPU core, and no hyperthreading. Intel Xeon Platinum processors work with Intel’s software tools, including the Intel Math Kernel Library. They also support advanced vector processing features like AVX-512 for faster calculations.

HC-series VMs feature 100 Gb/sec Mellanox EDR InfiniBand. These VMs are connected in a nonblocking fat tree for optimized and consistent RDMA performance. These VMs also supports Adaptive Routing and Dynamic Connected Transport (DCT), along with standard Reliable Connection (RC) and Unreliable Datagram (UD) transports. These features enhance application performance, scalability, and consistency, and their usage is recommended.

Migration and alternatives

To avoid service disruption, plan to migrate your HC-series workloads before May 31, 2027. For current-generation HPC alternatives, consider:

HBv5-series – Offers higher compute performance and better price-performance than HBv4, suitable for most memory-bandwidth intensive HPC workloads.
HX-series – Optimized for high-memory HPC workloads with approximately twice the memory capacity of HBv4, ideal for large-scale EDA and molecular dynamics.

For migration steps, see Change the size of a virtual machine.

Host specifications

Part	Quantity ^{Count Units}	Specs ^{SKU ID, Performance Units, etc.}
Processor	32 - 44 vCPUs	Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 (Skylake) [x86-64]
L3 Cache	60.5 MB
Memory	352 GB	190 GB/s
Local Storage	1 Disk	700 GiB
Remote Storage	4 Disks
Network	8 vNICs 1 InfiniBand EDR NIC	40 Gb/s 100 Gb/s
Accelerators	None

For features supported by this series, see the Feature support section.

Sizes in series

vCPUs (Qty.) and Memory for each size

Size Name	vCPUs (Qty.)	Memory (GB)	L3 Cache (MB)	Memory Bandwidth (GB/s)	Base CPU Frequency (GHz)	Single-core Frequency Peak (GHz)	All-core Frequency Peak (GHz)
Standard_HC44rs	44	352	60.5	191	2.7	3.7	3.4
Standard_HC44-16rs	16	352	60.5	191	2.7	3.7	3.4
Standard_HC44-32rs	32	352	60.5	191	2.7	3.7	3.4

VM Basics resources

Check vCPU quotas

Local (temp) storage info for each size

Size Name	Max Temp Storage Disks (Qty.)	Temp Disk Size (GiB)
Standard_HC44rs	1	700
Standard_HC44-16rs	1	700
Standard_HC44-32rs	1	700

Storage resources

Table definitions

¹Temp disk speed often differs between RR (Random Read) and RW (Random Write) operations. RR operations are typically faster than RW operations. The RW speed is usually slower than the RR speed on series where only the RR speed value is listed.
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.
To learn how to get the best storage performance for your VMs, see Virtual machine and disk performance.

Remote (uncached) storage info for each size

Size Name	Max Remote Storage Disks (Qty.)
Standard_HC44rs	4
Standard_HC44-16rs	4
Standard_HC44-32rs	4

Storage resources

Table definitions

¹Some sizes support bursting to temporarily increase disk performance. Burst speeds can be maintained for up to 30 minutes at a time.
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.

Network interface info for each size

Size Name	Max NICs (Qty.)	Max Network Bandwidth (Mb/s)
Standard_HC44rs	8	40000
Standard_HC44-16rs	8	40000
Standard_HC44-32rs	8	40000

Networking resources

Table definitions

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).

Network interface info for each size

Size Name	Backend NICs (Qty.)	RDMA Performance (Gb/s)
Standard_HC44rs	1	100
Standard_HC44-16rs	1	100
Standard_HC44-32rs	1	100

Backend Networking resources

Set up Infiniband on HPC VMs

Feature support

Feature name	Support status
Premium Storage	Supported
Premium Storage caching	Supported
Live Migration	Not Supported
Memory Preserving Updates	Not Supported
Generation 2 VMs	Supported
Generation 1 VMs	Supported
Accelerated Networking	Supported
Ephemeral OS Disk	Supported
Nested Virtualization	Not Supported
Backend Network	InfiniBand EDR

Availability and purchasing

Important

Sales of 1-year and 3-year Reserved Instances for HC-series are no longer available as of April 2, 2026. Pay-as-you-go remains available until the retirement date of May 31, 2027. After May 31, 2027, service-level agreements and support for HC-series end, and all remaining HC-series VMs will be automatically deallocated.

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.

Next steps for HC-series customers

Caution

Plan to migrate your HC-series workloads before May 31, 2027. After this date, remaining HC-series VMs will be automatically deallocated. Evaluate these current-generation alternatives for your HPC workloads:

HBv5-series – Higher compute performance and better price-performance than HBv4
HX-series – High-memory HPC workloads with approximately twice the memory capacity of HBv4

For migration steps, see Change the size of a virtual machine and Migrate your HC-series virtual machines by May 31, 2027.

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Last updated on 2026-04-17

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HC sizes series

Migration and alternatives

Host specifications

Sizes in series

VM Basics resources

Feature support

Availability and purchasing

Other size information

Next steps

Next steps for HC-series customers

Feedback

Additional resources