Three-Year Azure VM Savings

Customers planning to run Azure VMs for an extended period can achieve significant discounts by exploiting two special purchase options, which can be used individually or in tandem. First, Azure Hybrid Benefit (AHB) options for Windows Server and SQL Server allow a customer to apply Software Assurance (SA)-covered on-premises licenses to earn discounts on hourly Azure VM fees. Second, Azure Reserved VM Instances provide customers a discounted hourly Azure VM rate in exchange for a one-year or three-year commitment to pay for a continuously running workload (regardless of actual use). The two charts below outline potential savings for two different workloads, each run within its own 16-core (“D16v3”) Azure VM: a generic Windows Server VM workload (such as an Active Directory domain controller) and SQL Server Standard edition running within a Windows Server VM.

Azure prices used in this comparison are for the West US 2 region and based on the standard Azure calculation of a 730-hour month. Prices were extracted from Microsoft’s Azure Pricing Calculator page (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?service=virtual-machines) on Oct. 4, 2018, and represent the highest price a U.S.-based volume licensing customer would pay for the services (for example, prices do not reflect additional discounts that large Enterprise Agreement customers usually receive). Azure pricing was also confirmed via https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/windows/ and https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/sql-server-standard/. SA fees used in the charts are at U.S. Open No Level [NL] pricing, which represents the highest price a U.S. volume licensing customer would pay.