Why is VM usage being so heavily restricted on MSDN Professional Azure subscriptions?

Question

I am a developer for a business that uses Azure cloud services for their product. We have MSDN professional azure subscriptions to support this development effort.

As part of my development activity I need to be able to spin up compute/VMs in my subscription for development/testing purposes. Currently, EVERY VM family type, save for 3-4 prohibitively expensive one (so EVERY B family for example) are marked as "Unavailable in this region" for both uksouth and ukwest. I have confirmed this is not a quota issue on the account (they all show as 0 of 20). I have also confirmed our production subscriptions all allow creation of these VMs in these regions absolutely fine.

I see the usual response to this is to reach out to support for them to unlock availability but I did so and received the following reply:

"Thank you for requesting zonal access. Unfortunately, due to high demand for virtual machines in this region, we are not able to approve your quota request at this time."

I am struggling to see how this is an acceptable response. I could understand if one or two VM families were experiencing capacity issues in a specific region - but this is blocking ALL compute across the regions I work in. Surely MSDN based subscriptions are specifically designed to support Azure development effort yet mine is essentially blocked from exactly this.

Is there no other way of resolving this?

Answer 1

Hello @James ,

I completely understand how blocking this is for your development work but what you’re experiencing is due to regional capacity constraints rather than quota limits. The regions you’re targeting UK South and UK West are currently under heavy usage, and popular VM families (such as B-series) are among the most in demand.

Even though your quota shows available, actual deployment depends on real-time regional capacity. In high-demand scenarios, MSDN subscriptions can be more impacted by allocation restrictions than production subscriptions.

Azure is continuously working to expand and recover capacity in these regions, but while demand remains high, allocation requests may continue to be declined.

In the meantime, you could consider:

• Trying an alternate region (if possible)
• Testing with a different VM size family
• Retrying periodically as availability can change

If the region and availability zones are mandatory, another practical option would be to use a Pay-As-You-Go subscription for these deployments, as those subscriptions may have broader access to constrained capacity compared to MSDN-based subscriptions.