The Azure Hybrid Benefit is essentially a way of being allowed to bring your own licenses to license the Windows Server part of an Azure virtual machine. Customers are eligible for the Azure Hybrid Benefit if they have active Software…
An Azure Savings Plan is another way of making a duration based commitment to get attractive pricing, but it’s much more flexible than a Reservation. It applies across a range of Azure services, including virtual machines, and across all Azure…
A Reservation is a way of making a duration-based commitment to one of the Azure services to get attractive pricing. If you commit to the compute part of a virtual machine, then that’s called a Reserved Instance. When you buy…
When you buy a Windows Server virtual machine in Azure you need to pay for two components of the VM: the infrastructure, or compute, costs, and the fee for the Windows Server operating system component. As a customer you can…
This section will give you a good overview of the various ways of licensing Windows Server virtual machines in Azure.
An important topic for this overview section is the notion of an Azure Subscription. An Azure Subscription is a container to which resources are assigned as they are created. It is always linked to a billing mechanism – the EA,…
When Azure was first made available in the Enterprise Agreement customers used the Azure Enterprise Portal to track usage and spend of the Azure consumption services. However, this portal was retired by Microsoft in November 2023 and customers now use…
The Azure Management Portal is used by two types of users. Firstly, technical people use it to set up the resources such as virtual machines. Volume Licensing customers and those buying through the MCA-E have direct access to this portal,…
When customers are considering deploying a solution based on the Azure consumption services, they need some idea of how much the solution will cost, and the Azure Pricing Calculator is an excellent tool to assist with this. Let’s imagine that…
The majority of this content is devoted to specific solutions based on the Azure consumption services – virtual machines for example. This first section gets you up to speed with some fundamental principles that work across all of the consumption…