Reserved Instances

With Reserved instances in Azure, you can commit to a 1-year or 3-year term for a virtual machine. By doing so, the price of the virtual machine is heavily discounted (up to 72%, more if you combine you Reserved instances with Azure Hybrid Benefit). Virtual machines that are consistently up are prime candidates for reserved instances.

Reserved Instances are created for a specific virtual machine family size and region. A reservation cannot span multiple regions or virtual machine series.

Reserved Instances are not available for MSDN dev/test subscriptions and may not available for all virtual machine sizes and regions (ex: A-series and G-series are not eligible).

For additional information, refer to Microsoft's documentation article: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/billing/billing-understand-vm-reservation-charges

Note: Reserved instances use a different permissions model than regular subscriptions. By default, only the user that has created the reservation will be able to see it. As such, it is possible that ShareGate Overcast recommendations may not 100% represent the actual state of your Azure subscription. The best way to ensure that you can see all reservations is to add the user as Reader to the root management group of your tenant.

To be considered a candidate, a Virtual Machine must fill the following criteria:

• Have 70% or more uptime over the past 3 months;
• Be in a region and of a size that is supported by Reserved Instances.

How to apply the recommendation

1. Click View in Portal to open the Azure Portal.
2. Click Add on the top menu.
   
3. Select the settings for the reservation. Shared reservations can be used across multiple subscriptions.
   Note: Alternatively, you can limit the reservation to a single subscription. Reservations must specify region and virtual machine series.
   
4. click Select.
5. Enter a name for your reservation.
6. Enter the quantity.
   
7. Review and buy your reservation.
8. Virtual machine usage will automatically get deducted from Reserved Instances for the scope, region and virtual machines series.