You may already know the many advantages associated with moving to a public cloud such as Azure. It removes the cost of onsite infrastructure, need for maintenance, and eliminates servers to manage. This can give you and your team more time to complete projects that will bring in additional revenue.
With the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit (Azure HUB) you can use on-site Window Server licenses with Software Assurance in order to run Windows Server virtual machines through Azure at base computer rates. This can lead to huge savings for your company.
What is the Azure Hybrid Use Benefit
What Azure Hybrid Use Benefit does is allow you to extend your current on-site Windows Server licenses and Software Assurance onto the cloud – which in turn reduces the cost of operating Windows virtual machines in Azure.
By using your pre-existing licenses, you avoid the cost of Azure licensing, and instead pay only the base rate to save up to 40% of the normal cost.
Here’s an example that will better explain exactly what this all means.
- Hourly computing costs – While setting up a virtual machine in Azure’s portal or through PowerShell, there is an hourly cost associates. This is including things like RAM, hard drive space, etc.
- Windows licensing – You must pay a licensing fee to run a Windows virtual machine in Azure. But with Azure Hybrid Use Benefit, you use your current license to run a virtual machine on the cloud.
Your savings will, of course, vary based on many factors, such as location, usage, and virtual machine series. However, Microsoft has stated that savings of up to 41% is possible when utilizing Azure HUB.
Who is the Azure Hub Best For
If your business is a customer of Microsoft using either Windows Server Standard or Datacenter, you may be eligible to use the problem. If you answered yes to the first question and you also have Software Assurance, you are eligible for saving up to 40% through the Windows virtual machine licenses in Azure.
Azure HUB can dramatically reduce the costs associated with moving to the cloud, whether you use it to deploy new virtual machines, migrate your data center, or only move a few things to the cloud. You get the savings mentioned above, but you also gain a flexible cloud platform that lets you do the following:
- Save on computing power
- Pay for only what you use
- Scale resources quickly up or down
Restrictions Regarding Eligibility
There are some restrictions that you should be aware of before you jump right on this offer. As an example, there is a limit to the number of Windows virtual machines that are covered. Of course, you must also fit the eligibility criteria we mentioned earlier, including having a Server Standard or Server Datacenter customer account with Software Assurance. Each has different restrictions
Windows Server Datacenter with SA License
When you are a Window Server Datacenter customer and you have Software Assurance, the Azure HUB benefits are added to your licenses. This lets you continue to use unlimited virtualization on each licensed host on-site, but also lets you run a Windows virtual machine in Azure from the same license.
Windows Server Standard
This type of license is a bit different. You may choose to use your license either in Azure or on-site, but you cannot do both. This is a hard choice for many and something that needs to be considered.
If you are interested in utilizing Azure HUB for your own business, and you meet the criteria, you can find more information on Microsoft’s website. That will run you through all the steps you need to take and get you going quickly.