As you may have heard by now, Microsoft Azure Reserved Virtual Machine (VM) Instances allow you to make an all upfront commitment to utilize specific virtual machines for a 1 or 3-year period, in return for a discount on your compute costs. Not only is the estimated cost savings 72% (82% with the Azure Hybrid Benefit), but you also get prioritized compute capacity!
Planning your first Reserved VM Instance purchase can be an overwhelming task if you are using spreadsheets to manually evaluate your options. Thankfully you can alleviate this pain by leveraging a cloud management solution. For instance, at CloudHealth Technologies, we make it our mission to help organizations across the globe manage their reservations easily and effectively. As of March 2018, we’ve expanded our reach to support Azure Reserved VM Instances! Making CloudHealth the only cloud management platform to support purchase modeling, amortization, and reporting of Azure Reserved VM Instances.
The first step towards achieving this savings is to model your Reserved VM Instance purchase with RI optimization reports, such as the newly released CloudHealth Virtual Machine RI Optimizer. The RI Optimizer analyzes your virtual machine usage to determine which RIs will provide you the best ROI. You can customize your quote by selecting extended options such as reservation scope, enrollment, machine series, and more. In the image below, you can see an example of a detailed quote showing the recommended purchase, including the upfront cost, savings, and when you will break even.
CloudHealth takes reservation management a step further by providing reports to evaluate the utilization of your reservations. You can easily identify Reserved VM Instances that are not being used efficiently, and opportunities where you should purchase more reservations. A key benefit of Azure Reserved VM Instances is that Microsoft allows you to exchange or cancel your reservations at any time (for an adjusted refund). By having insight into the utilization of your reservations, you can determine if there are any modifications you can make to maximize savings.
