vCPU limitations on Azure for Students+ Pay as you Go move

Anonymous
2020-12-27T16:10:09.927+00:00

Hello!
Asking here as requested by @AzureSupport on Twitter.

I'm currently on Azure for Students, having a good time so far and preparing to run a CPU-intensive program as part of my University work, and was hoping to utilise a high core count VM for a few hrs to batch run my program and save a few days/weeks of processing.
I'm happy that I can get this done within the budget limits of the $100 student plan, but my account is capped at 4 vCPUs. From what I gather online, this is intentional and non-movable.

If I were to look into a Pay as you go account, would this solve my issues? A few q's:

  1. Can I take my existing VM configuration, storage etc with me?
  2. Will I lose the $100 credit / is it usable somehow?
  3. Am I able to set spend limits to minimise my charging as much as possible? Googling around the issue gives conflicting opinions.

Thanks and apologies if these are more obvious questions than I realise!

Jon

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  1. Andreas Baumgarten 94,196 Reputation points MVP
    2020-12-27T16:42:39.74+00:00

    You should be able to create an additional PayAsYouGo subscription in the same Azure tenant parallel to the Azure student subscriptions.
    This way you won't loose the benefits of the students subscription.

    Regarding 1.:
    It's possible to copy the VM from one subscription to another. There are a few How-Tos around in the internet. One is this one:
    https://gennaromigliaccio.com/how-to-duplicate-an-azure-virtual-machine

    Regarding 2.:
    If you create a new PayAsYouGo subscription it's an additional one. The existing subscription for students should be still available.

    Regarding 3::
    In a PayAyYouGo subscription you can work with a Budgets or Cost Alerts to control the costs.


    (If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

    Regards
    Andreas Baumgarten

    1 person found this answer helpful.

  2. Andreas Baumgarten 94,196 Reputation points MVP
    2020-12-27T17:11:05.58+00:00

    The "Attempt 3" of the linked How-To describes the steps you need to do.
    In short summary:

    1. Create a snapshot of the disk of your VM in the student subscription
    2. Export the snapshot to VHD file
    3. Copy the VHD file to the new PAYG subscription
    4. Create a new VM in the PAYG subscription using the copied VHD

    To keep the consumption small just make sure the VM is only running if needed. Stop/Deallocate the VM every time it isn't needed. This will at least keep the compute costs low. The storage costs of the disk will always be charged, no matter the VM is running or deallocated.


    (If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

    Regards
    Andreas Baumgarten

    1 person found this answer helpful.
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