General availability of instance size flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances

This blog post was co-authored by Arabinda Mohapatra, Prinicipal Engineering Manager, Microsoft Azure.

We are excited to announce instance size flexibility for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances, a new feature that makes your reserved instance purchasing and management even simpler by applying reservation discounts to different virtual machine (VM) sizes within the same VM group.

With instance size flexibility, you don’t have to deploy the exact same VM size to get the benefit of your purchased Azure Reserved Instances (RI) as other VM sizes within the same VM group also get the RI discount.

For example, consider the following VM groups:

If you have purchased 1 Azure Reserved Instance for a D2s_v3 VM, then the following VM Instances could be covered through your reserved instance purchase if they are in the same region:

1. 1 Standard_D2S_v3
2. 1/2 Standard_D4s_v3
3. 1/4 Standard_D8s_v3
4. 1/8 Standard_D16s_v3
5. 1/16 Standard_D32s_v3
6. 1/32 Standard_D64s_v3

Adding to the differentiated simplicity of Azure Reserved Instances, instance size flexibility applies your Azure Reserved Instance benefits to the infrastructure costs of your VM regardless of its operating system including Windows Server, Linux, RHEL, and more. You will be charged just for any additional software running in your VMs as applicable.

Instance size flexibility will be enabled by default for any existing Azure Reserved Instance with shared scope, while for reserved instances with single scope you can enable instance size flexibility from the reservation configuration. Read the documentation to learn how to change the scope for an Azure Reserved Instance. 

Next steps

To get started, please see our documentation to learn how to toggle instance size flexibility option for Single Reserved Instance.