Production Use of Microsoft Server Applications in Azure Virtual Machines

Microsoft offers product support for most of its server applications in production Azure virtual machines (VMs), but applications may vary in how they can be licensed. This chart lists all of the Microsoft server products that Microsoft supports in Azure VMs running Windows Server 2008 or newer. Two notable server applications that are unsupported are Exchange Server and Lync Server.

Depending on the application, customers may have up to two ways to pay for a product used within Azure Virtual Machines for production.

Pay-as-you-go. BizTalk and SQL Server are available in a pay-as-you-go model priced according to the number of virtual cores used for the instance. Windows Server requires the pay-as-you-go model when used in an Azure VM. The costs for Windows Server VMs in the pay-as-you-go-model are based on the VM compute and memory capacity (on an hourly basis) and the product editions used, and are in addition to any charges for BizTalk Server or SQL Server.

Reassignment of on-premises licenses to Azure. Most other Microsoft server applications supported in Azure Virtual Machines, including SharePoint Server and Project Server, provide a License Mobility through Software Assurance (SA) use right if all of the product’s client and server licenses are covered with SA. Under this use right, the customer purchases licenses for the application through volume licensing and then reassigns server-side licenses for the application to Microsoft—the multitenant service provider—under a set of License Mobility through SA rules. The customer also uploads an image containing the server application or installs the server application in an Azure VM.