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Windows Azure, Increase Cores count

  • Article

Windows Azure Subscription comes with core limit of 20. Many times this becomes a limitation. Recently in one of our project we were looking for deploying multiple large instances of 5 hosted services we have deployed in our azure subscription. Using default quota of 20 we can not achieve this.

 

Issue 

Default soft limit for Windows Azure Subscription is 20 cores. So using this limit you can build maximum of 10 medium instance or 5 large instances of any hosted services. To better understand the relation between Core number and Instance Size you may refer following table (referred from How to Configure Virtual Machine Sizes)

 

Virtual Machine Size

CPU Cores

Memory

Disk Space for Local Storage Resources in Web and Worker Roles

Disk Space for Local Storage Resources in a VM Role

Allocated Bandwidth (Mbps)

ExtraSmall

Shared

768 MB

19,480 MB

(6,144 MB is reserved for system files)

20 GB

5

Small

1

1.75 GB

229,400 MB

(6,144 MB is reserved for system files)

165 GB

100

Medium

2

3.5 GB

500,760 MB

(6,144 MB is reserved for system files)

340 GB

200

Large

4

7 GB

1,023,000 MB

(6,144 MB is reserved for system files)

850 GB

400

ExtraLarge

8

14 GB

2,087,960 MB

(6,144 MB is reserved for system files)

1890 GB

800

 

Resolution

As I said earlier this is a soft limit derived from average usage prospective. You can raise a quota increase ticket with Microsoft Support here. In my case support was really good and I got a call back and quota increased in couple of hours. Good point is the quota increase doesn’t impact billing and the user is charged based on usage and not number of Cores assigned.

 

Hope this information will be helpful. Please share your feedback and rate this article.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 16, 2013
    "charged based on usage and not number of Cores assigned"I think this is wrong. On my Virtual Machine I'm charged based on the number of cores I have.
  • Anonymous
    May 02, 2013
    ""charged based on usage and not number of Cores assigned"I think this is wrong. On my Virtual Machine I'm charged based on the number of cores I have."It's a very misleading way of putting it as by standard you get 20 cores available to use. Once you assign a VM (that uses x number of cores) then that VM will be charged at the rate of number of cores multiplied by the cost of a small compute hour for every real life hour that passes.You won't be charged for being able to have a maximum of 40 cores but you will be charged for every VM you have provisioned, whether it is powered on or not.
  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2014
    Ran into the same problem - right in the middle of a demonstration to a large customer interested in building our his infrastructure... I hope Microsoft is fast on the increase...
  • Anonymous
    January 22, 2014
    But is there any way to check that core limit has increased.
  • Anonymous
    February 19, 2014
    in virtual machine  dashborad, Usage overview, can see cores number
  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2015
    @Morten "On my Virtual Machine I'm charged based on the number of cores I have." This is true if you leave your machine running 7 * 24. But you are still charged per minute. So if your Dev team only work 8am - 6pm M-F, & you start & stop your Dev VM's in those hours. The cost drops by 70%. Hence IAAS VM's are charged by Usage. Using the formula: Usage(in minutes) * Cores * Type of Core(D, Dv2, G, N, A etc) * Type of Plan (Pay as you go, prepay etc) Also with a reboot, you an also quickly swap the size of the VM, within the Server type. Eg: D1 in the morning swap to a D5 for the big presentation, then back to D1 in the evening. Thus you are charged "per use" The PAAS servers don't offer the same level of control. If you turn them off you lose them & need to redeploy. You can reduce the number of instances back to one. Their autoscale is faster, but you always need to keep at least 1 running (2 if you want to keep the SLA).