Azure Virtual Machine Billing

Question

I dont know if this is the right place, but I am assuming MSFT staff also answers these questions since the azure portal links to StackOverflow?

Questions:

• I understand that Azure no longer bills me for a VM so long as it and its cloud service are stopped. But what is unclear is am I going to be billed for the Cloud Service itself? For example say i create a Virtual machine and by doing so i get a cloud service for it (with ip). Then I turn off that virtual Machine and the cloud service. Do i still get billed for the cloud service even though everything is turned off?
• Continuing on the question above. Do i get billed storage fees for the Virtual Machines filesystem. Currently windows vms are around 120GB in size. How does the billing work out for virtual machines? And how does it change if the machine is turned off.
• How are Custom Images billed? Say i create my Windows 2012 Master image with IIS and a few other components installed. Then I create my own Image so that I can bring up vms more rapidly. Where is the VM image stored? Will it be in my blob container under VHD's? And again will microsoft charge me to store this image? Will it be the full 120+ GB or the actual size of the image stored.

Sorry to ask these questions. Tried my best to google around and all i could find was a post by Scott Gu where he stated VMs wont be billed and very little detail beyond that.

Answer 1

I understand that Azure no longer bills me for a VM so long as it and its cloud service are stopped. But what is unclear is am I going to be billed for the Cloud Service itself? For example say i create a Virtual machine and by doing so i get a cloud service for it (with ip). Then I turn off that virtual Machine and the cloud service. Do i still get billed for the cloud service even though everything is turned off?

Essentially think of a cloud service as a shell under which you deploy a VM. Among other things, a cloud service provides you with a DNS (yourcloudservice.cloudapp.net for example). What you get charged for is the VM and not the cloud service so if you have nothing deployed in a cloud service, you don't get charged anything.

Continuing on the question above. Do i get billed storage fees for the Virtual Machines filesystem. Currently windows vms are around 120GB in size. How does the billing work out for virtual machines? And how does it change if the machine is turned off.

Yes, I believe so. You would be charged for 120 GB of storage (based on this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sql_shep/archive/2013/06/10/azure-billing-per-minute-and-no-compute-charge-for-a-stopped-iaas-vm.aspx) [See my note on pricing below].

How are Custom Images billed? Say i create my Windows 2012 Master image with IIS and a few other components installed. Then I create my own Image so that I can bring up vms more rapidly. Where is the VM image stored? Will it be in my blob container under VHD's? And again will microsoft charge me to store this image? Will it be the full 120+ GB or the actual size of the image stored.

Custom images are billed in a similar way as standard images as in both cases the VHD file is stored in your blob storage account so Microsoft will charge you for storage. Since VHDs are essentially saved as page blobs and page blobs are only charged based on the bytes occupied you will only be charged for the space you consumed.

UPDATE

VHD Pricing: Essentially VHDs are stored in blob storage as page blobs and the pricing of page blobs is calculated a little bit differently. For page blobs, you're only charged for the bytes you used instead of total blob size. So for example, you have a VHD of 120 GB size (i.e. your page blob size is 120 GB) but you're only occupying 30 GB there, you're only charged for 30 GB and not 120 GB.

Answer 2

As @Gaurav stated, you're not charged for the service container, only for running vm's. In the case of stopped VM's, you won't be charged, although you lose your assigned IP address if you have no other running vm's. You can choose to keep a vm provisioned to preserve IP address but then you'll continue paying for the VM. When a VM is stopped, you'll still pay for its storage (since these are persistent virtual machines).

Regarding storage costs: While the vhd might be a 120GB disk, you only pay for storage that's been actually used. That is, the page blob uses sparse allocation. If you format a 120GB volume but only use 30gb, you're billed for 30gb monthly, not 120gb. You pay for all vhd's, including your custom images, since each is stored in your storage account. Again, you don't pay for 120gb on your custom images; just for the allocated pages.

Answer 3

I don't think you get charged for the OS disk. If you have a data disk then you will be charged for the space used.