Microsoft customers rely on Azure to host mission-critical workloads and services. A substantial percentage use the traditional infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) approach to deploying virtual machines, often orchestrated with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets or third-party tools.
Customers rely on Azure to provide compute capacity on demand. However, in some situations, customers need more specific assurances:
◉ Business-critical applications—certain business processes can be disrupted even by a temporary interruption.
◉ Disaster recovery (DR)—in the event of a natural disaster, businesses require capacity guarantees to recover and resume operations in a different location.
◉ Special events—sometimes a substantial surge in capacity is expected, obtaining capacity assurance can ensure that business performance remains at the highest levels.
Until now, the only way to obtain a service level agreement (SLA) for Azure Virtual Machines capacity has been to deploy actual virtual machines (VM), whether running or stopped. This can lead to management overhead to keep all VMs up to date and impedes the use of compute capacity for other business purposes, for example when the VMs are not needed for a primary workload.
Introducing on-demand capacity reservations
Today we are announcing the preview of on-demand capacity reservations for Azure Virtual Machines. This new feature allows you to deploy and manage the compute capacity required to run Azure VMs separately from the VMs themselves. On-demand capacity reservations will come with a defined SLA (forthcoming at general availability).
This creates new options for you to better manage your capacity needs. More specifically, as outlined above:
◉ Business-critical applications—use on-demand capacity reservations to protect your capacity, for example when taking these VMs offline to perform updates.
◉ Disaster recovery—you now have the option to set aside compute capacity to ensure a seamless recovery in the event of a natural disaster. The compute capacity can be repurposed to run other workloads whenever DR is not in effect. The VM maintenance can be handled by keeping core images up to date without the need to deploy or maintain VMs outside of DR testing.
◉ Special events—claiming capacity ahead of time provides assurance that your business can handle the extra demand.
An on-demand capacity reservation will operate as a deployable object: specify a VM size, location, and quantity using the Compute Resource Provider. Upon successful completion of a reservation, customers can then assign VMs to the reserved capacity. The reservation is on-demand because there is no term commitment required. You can delete on-demand capacity reservations whenever they are no longer needed.
The lack of a term commitment means that reservations can be made using pay-as-you-go terms based on the underlying price of the VM size (without the cost of the operating system you may want to deploy later on), location, and quantity of the reservation. Within the Azure billing system, any available term discounts from purchased Reserved VM Instances (RIs) will be automatically applied. The rules for applying RIs to VM usage will be the same that we have in place today for reservations and virtual machines.
Here is a comparison between on-demand capacity reservations and RIs:
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