Microsoft announce the preview of Azure virtual machine vCore customisation, with two features that give you greater control over the CPU resources of a VM. Firstly, you can disable Simultaneous Multi-Threading allowing you to run a VM with only one thread per physical core which can improve performance for certain workloads. Secondly, and more interesting from a licensing perspective, you can choose a custom number of virtual cores for a new VM which is lower than the default count for that VM size. Now, this doesn’t reduce the price of the VM, but it can reduce the licensing costs for software billed by virtual core – SQL Server for example.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/47609uA, and some useful Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/4oRzSWU.