Generally Available: vCore Customization: Disable Multithreading and Configurable Constrained Cores

Today, we are announcing the General Availability of VM vCore Customization for Azure Virtual Machines, introducing two new capabilities: Disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading/Hyper-Threading (SMT/HT) and Configurable Constrained Cores. These features provide greater control over virtual CPU configurations, helping customers optimize performance while reducing software licensing costs.

With VM vCore Customization, customers can now disable SMT/HT on supported VMs to provide workloads exclusive access to physical cores for improved latency consistency and performance. Customers can also select from supported vCPU counts to align with software licensing requirements or workload demands without changing the VM's memory, storage, or network bandwidth.

By decoupling active core count from VM size, organizations can deploy larger-memory or higher-bandwidth VMs while activating only the vCores they need. This is especially valuable for licensed software workloads such as SQL Server, Oracle, and SAP, where licensing costs are tied to core count.

VM vCore Customization is now available in all Azure public regions and includes support for Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) Uniform orchestration mode. Customers can configure these capabilities through the Azure portal, ARM templates, Azure CLI, and PowerShell. Support is currently available for first-party Azure operating system images. Marketplace images that include third-party licensing are not supported.