Enable Azure Hybrid Benefit For Windows Server/Azure Virtual Machines

In this article, we’ll learn about Hybrid Cloud, benefits of Hybrid Cloud and then dive into Azure Hybrid Benefit. We’ll also understand about MultiCloud and then learn the process to enable Azure Hybrid Benefit for the Windows Server and check about the status of the Azure Hybrid Benefit in the always existing Azure Virtual Machines.

What is Hybrid Cloud?

Hybrid Cloud can be understood as the process or approach of mixing on-premises infrastructure with private and public cloud such as Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Services and AWS to utilize computing, storage and numerous resources along with different service environments.

Benefits of Hybrid Cloud

Using the hybrid cloud over only on-premises infrastructure or pure overall cloud infrastructure has numerous benefits. It can be listed as follows.

Better Productivity

With Hybrid Cloud, DevOps and Agile methodologies can be adopted and expanded with ease allowing teams to develop once and then deploy over to the cloud.

Solution to Compliance Issues and Better Security

As we’ve discussed about GDPR in previous article, Implementation of GDPR with Azure, making sure of following the GDPR guidelines is a difficult task. Thus, with Hybrid Cloud, organizations can make sure the security and compliance issues are all met to mitigate any compliance issues across different regions.

Business Growth

Hybrid Cloud allows significantly shorter product development cycles thus accelerating the process of innovation and the time to reach out to market along with better delivery time to clients and response time from customer making it suitable for rapid business growth.

Efficiency

Hybrid Cloud offers granular control of resources such that the teams can optimize usage across on-premises infrastructure, private and public cloud making it easier to modernize applications efficiently.

Why do we need Hybrid Cloud?

In today’s time, the customer environments are continuously evolving and when each organization is producing 100’s and 1000’s of apps, they tend to require diverse infrastructure. Thus, hybrid cloud has been paramount than ever before.

Multicloud

MultiCloud can be understood as the model of the utilization of cloud computing in a way such that it uses two or more different clouds which can be private as well as public cloud. The most used current options for cloud computing are Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, Oracle and IBM Cloud.

Hybrid and MultiCloud

Azure supports various multicloud as well as hybrid solutions along with numerous products. For Apps, Data, Management, Identity, Security and Networking Azure has different services from Azure Arc, Backup and Disaster Recovery, Azure Active Directory and more.

Azure Hybrid Benefit

Azure Hybrid Benefit is basically a licensing benefit that enables reduction of the costs of running various workloads in cloud significantly. This is possible by allowing users to use the on-premises SQL Server and Windows Server licenses on Azure. Lately, SUSE Linux along with RedHat subscriptions can also be applied.

If we take in comparison to AWS, it is over five times more expensive than the SQL Server and Windows Server enabled by Azure. With Azure Hybrid benefit organizations can save up to 85% of the cost thus enabling the lowest possible costs of ownership.

One can check out the possible savings using the calculator provided by Azure.

How do we enable Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server?

Step 1

Login into Microsoft Azure. You’ll be welcomed to the Home page which would look like this.

Step 2

Search for Windows Server itself or Virtual Machine.

Step 3

Click on Create the Virtual Machine.

Step 4

Fill in the details about the subscription, Virtual Machine, Region and the Image – here it’s the Windows Server 2019.

Add in the Username and Password for the Administrator account. Remember these values as this would be required to access and use the Virtual Machine in future.

Step 5

Now, you can see the option for Azure Hybrid Benefit under Licensing.

Click on the question asked about to use the pre-existing license and confirmation.

Once Done, Click on Review + Create.

Step 6

Firstly, a validation check is performed. Once the Validation is passed, Create option can be viewed. Click on it.

Step 7

The deployment process will now initiate. Once the deployment is done, we can either create another virtual machine or check the resources.

Step 8

We can view our Virtual Machine windowsserverVM we just create. I continued to create another virtual machine named as vm2.

Thus, in this way, we can make sure Azure Hybrid Benefit option is selected while creating the Virtual Machine.

Similarly, what if we have already created numerous virtual machines and we need to check and make sure the Azure Hybrid Benefit is on.

How do we enable Azure Hybrid Benefit in existing Azure Virtual Machines?

Step 1

To check if the current VMs has turned on Azure Hybrid Benefit, we can check it from the Manage View.

Select the Edit Columns.

Step 2

You can add in the column and select Azure Hybrid Benefit. There is another way to do it – by Checking in Available Columns and adding the Azure hybrid benefit to the Selected columns.

Step 3

Once, you’ve enabled or if the Azure Hybrid Benefit is not enabled, we can see it from the VMs list itself with the selected columns.

Step 4

Now, click on any Virtual Machine you are running. Here, we select the windowsserverVM we initiate earlier.

You can see different monitoring features and key metrics values.

To see about the status of Azure Hybrid Benefit on this specific virtual machine, select the Configuration under Settings.

Step 5

Here, we can see the Azure Hybrid Benefit is turned on. Similarly, we can enable the Azure Hybrid Benefit in other Virtual Machines as per use and need.

In this process, we can validate and enable the Azure Hybrid Benefits and obtain over 85% of possible cost reduction from our usage cost.

Conclusion

Thus, in this article, we learned about Hybrid Cloud, the different benefits of Hybrid Cloud, MultiCloud and then dived deep into Azure Hybrid Benefit. We then went through a step-by-step tutorial to enable the Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server and similarly learned to enable the Azure Hybrid Benefit in the pre-existing Azure Virtual Machines.