Azure Benefit for Visual Studio Ultimate with MSDN

THE OFFER TERMS HAVE BEEN UPDATED AND CAN BE FOUND HERE.

Azure provides great benefits for Visual Studio subscribers with Visual Studio Ultimate. These benefits include $150 monthly credits of Azure, lower rates and no additional charge for using MSDN software on Azure for development and test.

Flexibility with Azure Credits

For the first month after activation of your benefit, you receive $200 of Azure credits. After the first month, you receive $150 of Azure credits every month. The choice is now yours on how you use your Azure credits. Use them on any Azure service based on your needs including, Virtual Machines, Websites, Cloud Services, Mobile Services, Storage, SQL Database, Content Delivery Network, HDInsight, Media Services, and many more.

Any unused monthly credits cannot be carried over to subsequent months and cannot be transferred to other Azure subscriptions.

Benefits

Virtualize with Lower Rates

Speed up your development and test using Azure virtual machines. Your credits now last longer because Visual Studio subscribers receive discounted hourly rates. That’s not all. Stop your virtual machines and we will stop billing them within a minute.

Discounted Hourly Rates

All instances for Windows Virtual Machines, Cloud Services, and Websites are discounted. Visual Studio subscribers pay reduced rates (corresponding to Linux rates) for all of these services, providing up to a 40% discount off our Pay-as-you-go rates.

Monthly usage in excess of the monthly credit amount included with your offer will be charged at either the discounted rates listed in the table above or the Pay-As-You-Go rates for other services not listed in the table. If the Spending Limit has been removed, charges will be incurred at the Pay-As-You-Go rates.  If the Spending Limit is set at $0, your subscription will be suspended upon using the third party service. You will be notified at least 30 days in advance of any changes to the rates.

No additional charge for using MSDN software

There is no additional charge for the MSDN software that runs on top of Windows Server such as SQL Server. You get access to preconfigured virtual machine images with MSDN software, such as SQL Server and BizTalk Server. Alternatively, upload your own virtual machine with your MSDN software. You will only be charged at the discounted Windows Server rate as listed in the table above.

On your Azure Visual Studio subscription, you can use the software covered by your MSDN subscription for development and test purposes, with the exception of Windows client which is not licensed for usage on Azure.

Microsoft server software that are supported by Azure Virtual Machines are listed here.

Use up to your monthly Azure credits at no charge. If you exceed your monthly credits, your service will be disabled for that month. You can choose to turn off your Spending Limit, and any usage each month in excess of the monthly credits will be charged at the rates specified in this offer. Read more about the Spending Limit feature.

Any taxes which may result from receiving services at no charge are the sole responsibility of the recipient.

You must have a Visual Studio Ultimate with Visual Studio subscription and utilize a Microsoft Account associated with that subscription. You must maintain an active MSDN membership to enjoy the Azure MSDN benefit. This offer is limited to one per subscriber.

Exclusions

Azure Credits may not be used to purchase Azure support plans, third-party branded products, or products otherwise sold separately from Azure (for example, Microsoft Azure Active Directory Premium).

Payment options

All you need is a phone number, a credit card or a debit card (non-prepaid), and a Microsoft account or a GitHub account. Only credit cards are accepted in Hong Kong and Brazil.

More details on pricing and billing can be found on the Azure pricing page.

Cancellation policy

You may cancel at any time. Payment is required for any outstanding fees incurred.

Offer availability

This offer is available to customers located in the following countries/regions and will be billed in the currency noted:

Limits, Quotas and Constraints

Please refer to this document for a list of common Microsoft Azure limits, quotas and constraints.

The following monthly usage quotas are applied. If you need more than these limits, please contact customer service at any time so that we can understand your needs and adjust these limits appropriately.

Use Rights

This benefit is for development and testing only. We reserve the right to suspend any instance (VM or cloud service) that runs continuously for more than 120 hours or if we determine that the instance is being used for production. Production workloads must be run on regular subscriptions.

Service-level agreements

This benefit is exclusively for development and testing and does not carry a financially-backed SLA.

Resource Commitment

All increases in usage levels of service resources (e.g. adding to the number of compute instances running, or increasing the amount of storage in use) are subject to the availability of these service resources. Any quota described in the Limits, Quotas and Constraints section is not a commitment that there will be sufficient resources available for you to reach the quota.

For any subscriptions of this offer that are not incurring charges and are inactive for more than 90 days, we reserve the right to remove any compute resources including hosted service(s), virtual machines and websites. Please note that no data would be deleted and customers can redeploy at any time. We will also provide advance notice prior to removing any compute resources.

You can also avoid having your compute resources removed by doing either of the following every 90 days:

1. Log into either the Azure portal or the new Microsoft Azure portal
2. Access your resources via our Azure APIs