Effective November 8, 2022, Microsoft Virtual Machine Software Reservations are available.
These are the newest members of Microsoft’s reservations family. Microsoft Virtual Machine Software Reservations enable customers to take advantage of discounts by making a duration-based commitment (one or three years) when buying third-party software to run in their virtual machines (VMs). Participating third-party publishers are for example Canonical, Citrix, and Red Hat.
Customers can (1) choose to pay monthly or up-front, (2) change the size of the deployed VM while Microsoft handles the application of reservation benefits and overage charges, and (3) avoid redeploying their workloads when intending to use the reservation benefits.
When you prepay for your virtual machine software usage (available in the Azure Marketplace), you can save money over your pay-as-you-go costs. A software reservation only covers the cost of running the software plan you chose on an Azure VM. Hence, the discount is automatically applied to a deployed plan that matches the reservation, not on the virtual machine usage. You can buy reservations for virtual machines separately for more savings.
For the announcement of Microsoft Virtual Machine Software Reservations, please visit: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/general-availability-virtual-machine-software-reservations/.
For more information on how to purchase them, please visit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/reservations/buy-vm-software-reservation.
For specifics on how the discount is applied, please visit: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billing/reservations/understand-vm-software-reservation-discount.
For software licensing information on Microsoft products, please visit: https://www.schneider.im/software/microsoft/.
Please contact us for more information or to request a quote.
