Tag Archives: Azure

Launch of RHEL Software Reservations

Microsoft announce that Software Reservations for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are generally available. There are now 32 members of the Reservations family where you can receive a discount on an Azure service by making a duration-based commitment. For an RHEL Software Reservation you need to commit for a year, and you can expect discounts of up to 24% when you run RHEL software on Azure virtual machines. As we expect with Reservations, this Software Reservation is applied automatically to any deployed RHEL VMs that match the Reservation, and there’s also instance size flexibility which means that the discount is applied even when you deploy a VM with a different virtual core count from the Reservation.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4hNBq1W, and some useful Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/3JKKqrT.

Azure VM vCore customisation

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.

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux VMs

The Azure Hybrid Benefit for Linux allows you to bring your existing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) subscriptions to Azure, so that you only pay for the infrastructure costs of the VM on Azure.

If you don’t know much about how this benefit gets activated for Linux VMs then we’d recommend this splendid interactive demo from Microsoft: https://bit.ly/3JBNUwU.

Document Processing for Microsoft 365 – the new name for Syntex

Microsoft’s AI-powered content management services have been renamed from Microsoft Syntex to Document Processing for Microsoft 365. Supplementing SharePoint, the features and functionality remain the same as before, with the billing still tied to a pay-as-you-go Subscription in Azure. Interestingly, if you have this billing mechanism set up, there’s a limited amount of included capacity allowing you to try the services for free, until December 2025.

Discover the details of Document Processing here: https://bit.ly/4o1NHSy, with pricing information on this link: https://bit.ly/4qERUxx.

Azure AI Foundry Pricing Guide

There’s a new (June 2025) Azure AI Foundry Pricing Guide from Microsoft. Azure AI Foundry is a platform for developers and IT administrators to build and manage AI applications and agents and there are a LOT of moving parts. This 20-page guide does a useful job of explaining the different licensing models going through, for example, Pay-As-You-Go options, Provisioned Throughput Units (PTUs) and Azure AI Foundry Reservations.

Find this guide here: https://bit.ly/4lYpQlq.

Using Azure Reserved Instances

Reserved Instances are a splendid way of saving money on the compute charges for an Azure virtual machine. If you’re thinking of trying them for the first time, this Microsoft article is a useful read detailing the five key things you need to think about: https://bit.ly/4gT8t3a.

End of Azure support plan offer

Customers buying their Azure services through an Enterprise Agreement or via the MCA-E have long been eligible for free Azure Standard Support, but Microsoft announce that this offer is coming to an end on 30 June, 2024. After that time, customers will need to purchase one of the paid-for support plans.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/4cASdBh (search for “Azure support”), and details of the available support plans here: https://bit.ly/44i3x1h.

Centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server

Microsoft announce that the centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit for SQL Server is now generally available. This allows customers to assign eligible licences to their SQL Server resources in Azure at a whole Subscription or Billing Profile level rather than to individual resources, making it much easier to manage.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/3MKf3MN, and the useful Learn documentation here: https://bit.ly/3Olhk2f.

Microsoft Cost Management summary for 2022

The Microsoft Cost Management tools help you to manage your Microsoft cloud costs across Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure. There’s an excellent article giving an overview of the improvements that were made to the tools in 2022, as well as the new ways to save money that were introduced.

You can find the article here: http://bit.ly/3Wltkkw, with its many links to lots of useful resources.

Azure DevOps Server 2022

Microsoft release Azure DevOps Server 2022 to the web with no changes to the existing Server/CAL licensing model. Find the announcement of availability here: https://bit.ly/3X26Oyv.