Microsoft has announced the wider release of their DCa/ECa v6 series confidential virtual machines (VMs), powered by 4th generation AMD EPYC™ processors. These new VMs are now available in multiple global regions and feature Secure Encrypted Virtualization – Secure Nested Paging (SEV-SNP), a security feature that uses hardware-based encryption to ensure that a VM's memory is only accessible to that specific VM. The core function of these confidential VMs is to create a trusted execution environment (TEE) that prevents host management code and the hypervisor from accessing the VM's memory and state. Furthermore, the memory encryption keys are securely generated by a dedicated secure processor inside the CPU, making them unreadable by software. These offerings, which include general-purpose (DCasv6) and memory-optimized (ECasv6) options, provide improved performance and cost efficiency for processing sensitive data, such as PII and PHI.