Yesterday I helped a client purchase a 1-year reserved instance for their VM. I have 2 questions regarding the reservation itself, cost analysis and forecast.
How do I make sure that I've purchased the right reserved instance for the VM?
This is currently what I'm seeing under Cost Analysis (preview) -> Reservations. Does this mean the reserved instance is applied to the right VM now?
When will the forecast under the Cost Analysis be updated to reflect the reserved instance I just purchased? The forecast in the cost analysis remains as high as before purchasing the reserved instance. My client is rather cost-sensitive, so the high month-end forecast does not sit well at all.
Thanks in advance!
Related
Recently we have upgraded our SSAS resources. Currently our SSAS is on Azure VM costing us based on this VM type 'Standard E32-8s_v3'.
I am looking for a way to save more cost by selecting a better option.
What can be a good option to save cost and at the same time have better efficiency.
what factors/ differences can be considered if we go to Azure analysis services instead of SSAS on Azure VM.
Our SQL server is also on Azure VM.
We have our reports on Power BI report server and SSRS.
Data is coming from different resources like SAP, external parties etc using SSIS.
Can you please Advice/ Suggest a better options for our data architecture.
Thank you.
Your VM is 8 cores and 256GB RAM.
One factor in pricing you haven’t mentioned is SQL licensing. You didn’t specify whether you are renting the SQL license with the VM or bringing your own license and what that costs. I’m going to assume you are renting it. With Azure Analysis Services the license is included in the price.
In Azure Analysis Services 100QPU is roughly equivalent to 5 cores. So 200QPU (an S2) would be an equivalent amount of CPU and a similar price but only has 50GB RAM.
To get the equivalent amount of RAM the S8 would get you close (200GB RAM) but for substantially more cost.
If you have one large model which (at least during peak usage or processing) uses most of the 256GB RAM then it may be tough to move to Azure Analysis Services for a similar price. If you have several models on that one server then you could split them across several smaller Azure Analysis Services servers and it may be a reasonable price for you. Or you could scale up for processing when RAM is needed most and scale down for the rest of the day to save cost.
I am thinking of purchasing a 3 year reserved app service plan on azure.
For my site, normally 1 or 2 instances are just good enough, but in the busy time, I have rules to autoscale the site out to 10 instances.
If I buy a 3 year reserved app service plan and my site auto scale out, will I be charged by the reserved price or pay as you go price?
from their doc, my feeling is that I will be charged by pay as you go price.Is it right?
You are right, the reservation agreement is just a discount that will apply to the number of running instances that match the reservation scope and attributes. So any extra instances will be charged using your standard rate.
This rate will depend on the type of subscription you use for paying for the reservation. If you have an individual pay-as-you-go subscription, extra app services will be charged by pay-as-you-go price. However, if you have an enterprise agreement, the price will be different and will depend on the agreement.
I recently installed an Odoo-9 server on Azure.
The consumption was extremely high (150$ in 10 days).
Is it something usual?
Do you have an estimation about the consumption cost (processor & RAM)?
Thanks guys!
It depends on the type of the resources you are using. There is the Azure resources calculator you can use to estimate resources pricing.
150$/10 days is something that is similar to virtual machine.
Also, you can see the pricing breakout in your account (right corner of the screen, Bill button).
I'm looking at the Azure shared plan for $10 per month. Does it come with SQL Server and MySQL? I'm looking to host my personal site and project. I don't anything fancy. Just need the latest .Net support and if possible unlimited MySQL or SQL Server.
Azure pricing can be very difficult to figure out. So while this may not be a programming question, it sounds a lot like a deployment question that needs community help to answer.
Azure websites don't come with any kind of database support built in, unless you're loading a website image from the gallery.
Generally, any kind of relational storage will cost money. But it just doesn't have to cost a lot of money. Microsoft now has "Basic" SQL Database instances (in preview) that could cost as little as $2.50 per month, with up to 2GB of space. For the time being they still have "Web" tier databases for $10 a month up to 1GB.
Also, nothing in Azure is "unlimited." You always have a nominal charge for storage and data transfers out of the datacenter. So even a "free" website will still cost a buck or two per month for infrastructure charges.
Note that if you have MSDN Premium or Ultimate, you get a $100 to $200 per month Azure credit.
I run my own uk based hosting and web design company.
We have about 10 physical servers in a DC in the UK and host about 300 or so web sites, email servers and web applications. They are all on a windows server platform with a few linux VM's.
I now have a Windows Azure account, I have set up a medium windows 2008 server within my azure account and want to start using it to maybe host and migrate some of my web sites and services onto my azure account and new server. With the view that maybe I could move ALL my services over and get rid of the need for any of my physical servers in the DC.
My question that I am still really struggling with how much this will really cost me on an ongoing basis.
The billing area, doesnt really tell me much as it simply shows my bill as £0.00. It shows my usage but I am really struggling to compare the resources I am currently using compared to how its billed in azure? It doesnt even show me what it would have cost me if I werent ona trial.
I dont want to move web hosted sites over if its going to cost me more than hosting in my current DC.
I was thinking of moving many sites onto the new server i have set up as its a better spec than a few of my current servers, so would see a big benefit, I even considered setting up a much larger Server in my Azure account but again unsure as to the real cost of that box its hard to compare.
Do I simply need to look at the calculator and select the number of servers i wil deploy, select how much storage I need and bandwidth? Or do I need to look at the items in the billing area as well - such as:
Compute units,Storage Transactions,Data Transfer Out,Data Transfer In
When I set up the server it didnt ask me for how much storage I wanted it just set it up with about 150GB avaialble in the actual server.
Any advice as I really see this as something i want to use over the next 12 months, but not if once i have finally migrated stuff its going to cost me more than my normal hosting and i have to move stuff all back at the end of the 12 months.
Cheers
Because you're using Windows Azure Virtual Machines, you should first use the virtual machine pricing calculator. This calculator only displays the costs that are relevant for your scenario except for the storage transaction cost. Here is a breakdown of the costs you'll have to consider:
Virtual Machines
The Virtual Machine cost appears on the bill as compute units. Throughout the Windows Azure Virtual Machine preview, the cost per core per hour is $0.08. Once VMs reach general availability, the cost will be $0.115 per core per hour for Windows VMs and $0.085 for Linux VMs. Using the calculator, you can see that a medium instance uses two cores and will therefore be billed at $0.16 per hour during the preview period. You will have to use your best judgement to determine how many virtual machines you'll need and how large they should be.
Storage
You will have to pay for the data actually used within your VHDs. Let's assume you have one virtual machine with one VHD attached. If the size of the VHD 200GB, but only 100GB is used, you will have to pay for 100GB per month.
Bandwidth
Microsoft now only charges for egress data transfers (data going out of the data center). With this pricing change, the Data Transfer In section of the billing area will always be 0.00. Hopefully, you already have a good idea about your current outbound data usage. If so, you can calculate your bandwidth cost by simply moving the bandwidth slider to the correct spot.
Storage Transactions
If you scroll down to the Transactions section of this blog post, you'll see how storage transactions are counted. Basically, you count one transaction per write operation and possibly one transaction per read operation depending if the data is cached or not. The cost of storage transactions are negligible because you only have to pay one cent per 100,000 transactions. That's why storage transactions are left out of the calculator.
HTH
To answer such question in an input box has limitation to express in details. The cost calculator is there to give you an estimate of upper limit about what the cost will be if your usage are under selected limit. Based on my personal experiences if you choose higher limits of usage and keep the usages within your forecast limits, there will be no hidden charges. But the reality could be far different because you may not estimate the usages correctly at first and this could change the cost later.
For moving a traditional web hosting solution to Windows Azure, latest release of Windows Azure Virtual Machine is best fit as this requires minimum migration complexity. So the VM size you will choose will have fixed resources (compute, local storage, network bandwidth, disk I/O etc) and the cost will be fixed as long as you are under limit so there will not be unseen charges.
Windows Azure Storage is pay as you go (ranges ~$0.012/GB depend on usage limit) and there is no limit. When moving from traditions web hosting to Cloud environment, due to application architecture design, I have seen less Cloud storage usage and more VM storage so it may not cost a lot.
The place you will see cost variation is data egress/ingress and it is difficult to forecast as it is all depend on application usage, so this is something you will have to account as variable cost.
You can also contact Windows Azure Virtual Machine Forum where dedicated Windows Azure Virtual Machine resources are available to answer your such questions.
Finally One thing I would also add that Windows Azure Virtual Machines are still in preview mode so it would be best to bring some of your business to Windows Azure VM as trial and testing purpose because now matter what you think you may encounter problems (because it is preview release) and this could case service disruption.