We’re all looking for ways to save money within our Azure subscriptions and resources. How does a savings of up to 72% sound? Today I’d like to give you an Overview of  Azure Reserve Virtual Machine Instances, a payment option which allows you to get that savings off the standard pay as you go plan by pre-committing to a 1 or 3-year term for the compute of virtual machine usage.

If you know you’re going to use Azure virtual machines for an extended period for your cloud workloads, then this is worth looking at. Just keep in mind that this only covers the virtual machine compute; the networking, other software, Azure services or storage, as well as Windows and SQL Server licensing does not get applied to the reserve.

Although, people who have purchased on-prem licensing for their servers can use their Azure hybrid benefit which allows you to bring your own on-prem Windows and SQL licenses to Azure. If you’re currently using an enterprise agreement or pay as you go plan, if you choose to go with Azure Reserve VM Instances, your cost would be reduced against your enterprise agreement or the credit card that you use for your pay as you go plan would be billed according to what you’re using.

When you purchase your Reserve Instances, it’s instantaneous; you just go in and specify your machine type and the term (1 or 3 years). It will detect those machine types in your current subscriptions or if you’re adding new machine types, it will apply that savings to those machine types.

So, if you know you’re going to use a particular machine type for the next year, say for migration, you’ll experience a good savings by pre-committing up front. And the scope of the Reserved Instance can go across multiple subscriptions and apply the discount to each of them.

Gotchas

A couple things to note; first, when the term expires, it does not auto renew and your discount ends. You can renew your contract and choose your hardware that you need; you’re not stuck using the same hardware you originally specified. And second, Reserved Instances cannot be used for enterprise dev test subscriptions or virtual machines in Preview.