Introduction
You can use tools such as the Azure Pricing calculator, Azure Advisor, Azure Spot Virtual Machines (Spot VMs), and Azure Reservations to control the cost of the Windows Server infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VMs running in your organization’s Azure subscriptions.
Scenario
Contoso is a medium-size financial services company in London with a branch office in New York. Most of its compute environment runs on-premises on Windows Server. This includes virtualized workloads on Windows Server 2012 R2 hosts. Contoso IT staff are in the process of migrating Contoso servers to Windows Server 2019.
Contoso’s IT director realizes that Contoso has an outdated operational model with limited automation and reliance on dated technology. The Contoso IT Engineering team has started exploring Microsoft Azure capabilities. They want to determine whether Azure services might assist with modernizing the current operational model through automation and virtualization.
As part of the initial design, the Contoso IT team asked you, their lead system engineer and server administrator, to set up a proof of concept environment. This environment must verify whether Azure services can help to modernize the IT infrastructure and meet business goals.
Much of the work has been done in terms of planning the migration to Azure. All that remains is to migrate workloads to Azure. However, there are concerns about the cost of hosting workloads in Azure. In the past, most costs associated with IT have been capital expenditure. However, with a cloud-based subscription model, most costs are operating expenditures. The IT director wants more details about how costs can be managed.
By the end of this module, you'll be able to use the Pricing calculator to assess likely costs and use Azure Advisor to monitor actual costs for Azure resources. You'll also be able to implement Spot VMs and Azure Reservations, and describe the benefits of Azure Hybrid licensing options.
Learning objectives
After completing this module, you'll be able to:
- Use the Azure pricing calculator to estimate VM costs.
- Monitor and limit Azure resource costs.
- Implement Spot VMs and Azure Reservations.
- Describe the Azure Hybrid Benefit licensing offer.
Prerequisites
In order to get the best learning experience from this module, you should have knowledge and experience of the following:
- Managing Windows Server operating system and Windows Server workloads in on-premises scenarios, including Active Directory Domain Services (AD DS), Domain Name System (DNS), the Distributed File System (DFS), Microsoft Hyper-V, and file and storage services
- Common Windows Server management tools
- Core Microsoft compute, storage, networking, and virtualization technologies
- On-premises resiliency Windows Server-based compute and storage technologies
- Implementing and managing IaaS services in Azure
- Microsoft Entra ID
- Security-related technologies (firewalls, encryption, multi-factor authentication)
- Windows PowerShell scripting
- Automation and monitoring