Azure VM pricing

[jblackburnHWGA]

I'm looking at Azure VMs but I'm struggling to find pricing and how i license.

I currently have A5. I'm M365 and serverless. I'm running a few things off a desktop and I'm looking at moving them to an Azure VM. Wondering if someone has pricing etc.

 

The main things i want to run off the VM is SalamanderSoft and Aruba Airwave. Both don't really need much power or CPU. Aruba Airwave would go on first and Salamander in the future.

 

Thanks

[Steve21]

It's not really a straight question in terms of pricing, as it depends on things like storage/bandwidth usage/are you VPNing back to site/how many external IPs etc

 

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/pricing/#Pricing-by-product is the official calculator, but you'll need to add in items as you want them

 

Steve

[jblackburnHWGA]

What you're saying is its complicated lol. Why cant things be simpler.

For Aruba the vm would need to see the switches to work correctly. So i would need to VPN it back?

 

For Salamander it wouldn't need to come back to site as Salamander can run anywhere as long as it has the internet.

[snagrat]

I do this.

 

Used to have a VM and VPN for about £50 a month which did AD and Salamander, but then Salamander needed more RAM so I split it out.

 

Plus we run more in the cloud now.

 

You could easily do what you are planning for £75 a month

[snagrat]

Also check your firewall can VPN to Azure. Some ISPs will charge extra for this.

[jblackburnHWGA]

perfect, thanks snagrat. So looking at under £1000 for the year which is great.

We're using Smoothwall which should VPN to azure. I'll double check with them.

 

Are you paying for the VM directly to MS through O365 billing or are you using a third party? i'd prefer an annual thing as otherwise finance makes me do a PO every month

[snagrat]

Well I work for two trusts so different answers

 

Trust 1 - we have subscription from Stone which we just get billed monthly. We load one large PO of an estimated amount and the monthly invoice eats into it until empty.

 

Trust 2 - We pay on charge card. Just submit it as an expense.

 

Monthly is better for us now as we constantly change services we use in Azure.

[jblackburnHWGA]

one trust wasn't enough lol

 

Thats a good idea with the PO. I'll talk to finance and see if we can figure something out for it. I'm currently using Stone for our licenses so will have a chat with them.

Thank you for your responses, saved a good amount of googling.

[snagrat]

A key is to start basic. You can resize easily enough if you need more compute.

But rarely would you go smaller.

 

You need nowhere near as much RAM or CPU that you do on your own hardware. 4GB and 2vCPU would suffice for what you want it for.

[jblackburnHWGA]

Thanks

[Davit2005]

If you have admin/management access to your firewall it should not cost anything, getting the firewall VPN to work with Azure VPN could be another matter, lol.

[PotNoodleTech]

A key is to start basic. You can resize easily enough if you need more compute.

But rarely would you go smaller.

 

4GB and 2vCPU would suffice for what you want it for.

 

Thats what 3/4 of my on premise VMs have got lol.

[jblackburnHWGA]

I do have said access. So i don't need a VPN to connect to the Azure VM? I just need to use an external IP?

I'll need to do some reading lol I need to fully understand it if I'm going to use it.

[snagrat]

I do have said access. So i don't need a VPN to connect to the Azure VM? I just need to use an external IP?

I'll need to do some reading lol I need to fully understand it if I'm going to use it.

 

You can add an external IP to the VM (additonal cost) and then rdp to it.

 

But if you Site-to-Site VPN then you would just connect via internal IP.

 

Default Azure firewall would block external RDP, but internal would be open.