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PaulStirling's avatar
PaulStirling
Iron Contributor
Apr 28, 2023
Solved

Getting the most bang for your buck

Hi everyone,

 

We have been running 13 x Standard D16s v5 VMs for the past year with a scaling plan and customized idle script that kicks off users if idle for 60mins after hours (built in GPO session idle time or scaling plan Force off didn't suit our work patterns). We have a max session of 12 per Session host which is the magic number from our experience.

 

Our costs are within budget, however we wish to use a GPU machine with more RAM, CPU resource and potentially go down to 6 SH @ 24 user.

 

Given the costs of the appropriate VM template are 3x the cost of the current this doesn't quite work financially. Even with the our scaling.

 

Azure Recommendation is to use reserved instance but having them run 24/7 actually increases our costs.

 

The other is the 'savings plan'. I can't get my head around if this is actually going to save us money, and our MS client manager is unsure also.

 

Question: what is your experience with savings plans commits and would this be suitable in our scenario? 

  • leekie's avatar
    leekie
    Apr 28, 2023

    Hi Paul,

     

    I don't have any experience with savings plans, although we've gone down the route of reservations for some of our AVD. The reservation is discounting cost on 730 hours per month for the purchased SKU/family, so it'd be a case of looking at the total running hours across all the machines and buying a suitable number of reservations (if there's a desire to commit for that extended period).

     

    In our case, we saw additional value from moving to AMD-based VM SKUs, as they're approx 10% cheaper than their Intel counterparts and the Azure compute benchmark scores are higher. Win - win!

     

    Hope that helps,


    Matt

2 Replies

  • leekie's avatar
    leekie
    Copper Contributor
    Apr 28, 2023

    Hi Paul,

     

    I don't have any experience with savings plans, although we've gone down the route of reservations for some of our AVD. The reservation is discounting cost on 730 hours per month for the purchased SKU/family, so it'd be a case of looking at the total running hours across all the machines and buying a suitable number of reservations (if there's a desire to commit for that extended period).

     

    In our case, we saw additional value from moving to AMD-based VM SKUs, as they're approx 10% cheaper than their Intel counterparts and the Azure compute benchmark scores are higher. Win - win!

     

    Hope that helps,


    Matt