For the past year Microsoft have said that Generation 4 hardware is soon coming to its end of life. I know many installations that have used Generation 4 over 5 so its time to think of the plan to facilitate this move.

 A little background, Generation 4 is based om Intel E5-2673 v3 (Haswell)-based CPUs and is transitioning to Intel E5-2673 v4 (Broadwell) 2.3 GHz and Intel SP8160 (Skylake) processors. The change is expected to take place with a deadline of January 2023 and Microsoft state that to experience a wider range of vCore and storage scalability, accelerated networking, better I/O performance one should consider the move. If this is your plan then how?

Its as simple as a scale request when you hit the configure button within the Azure Portal.

If you have Generation 4 you will see Generation 5 type. If you have recently built a vCore Azure SQL Database it would already be Generation 5, but it’s worth checking!

Anyway, going back to the configure option, you will see the types available as per your change needs.