New Company to Azure and Citrix

[STEPHEN D HOLDER]

Greetings all,

I hope I am posting appropriate questions in the appropriate section -- there is just so much out there. If this isn't the exact space, please kindly direct me to where I should be.

I am a new company working with Citrix and Azure and we are fairly new to cloud hosting. I worked with Citrix to get the Azure/Citrix link established and now I am for the most part, up on Azure.

I have a couple of questions.

1) My company is currently on Microsoft Action pack. There apparently is a $100 credit each month allocated to us as we grow. Does this credit just eat way per Azure VM usage and then charge a card, and have the cycle repeat each month?

2) With Citrix comes licensing. The Citrix portion is handled by Citrix but I still need RDS licencing.  Do / would I go to my distributor, work out a deal, and build a new company RDS license server in Azure?  What's this Splock thing I keep hearing about?  Something to do with RDS licensing as I use them?

3)  Backups. Although Citrix advertises 'their' cloud, the back-end is definitively Azure. My question is, how are VMs backed up? An additional service provided by Azure? For example if I go to a customer and they inquire how VMs are backed up.. what do I tell them? "Azure handles it and not to worry?" -- I'm afraid that's not going to going over too well.  Futhermore, if a customer is uncomfortable having Azure maintain their VM files, what alternative are there?

4) As a Microsoft partner, I have to believe there is a pricing list for us versus traditional customer rates. Does anyone know where to find this price sheet?

[#2]

1) As long as you dont remove the limit, then no it wont just move on to the card.
But you can set it to do so.

2) Yes RDS licensing must be done outside of Azure, reseller

3) You can use Recovery services, depening on you scenario you can have simple vm backups, or you can use recovery services to allow datacenter fail over options.
you can also use a local agent that uses the recovery serivce for file backup if you dont wish to backup the entire machine.

4) i dont believe partners get better prices, but you do get perks more credit, 365 licenses etc the more customers you have and the more milestones you employees reach like certifications and assemeents. you could consider being a CSP partner if you have enough customers to justify this, this would give kick back i believe.