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I recently implemented SSRS on a Azure VM and was very surprised when I realized I would be billed for 100% of the hours in a month if my VM was running. This runs around $200 and is in no way economical for our small reporting service we use for about 5 days month. What are my options for reducing VM hours?

I have already established I can shutdown and deallocated the machine when we are not using it. Ideally though the service would go into some kind of sleep mode and reallocate when the service is pinged.

David Makogon
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user2168478
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3 Answers3

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You pretty much figured it out: When a VM is running, you're billed for it. This is how it's always been in Azure: Whether utilizing 0% or 100% of the VM, you're billed for the running VM. Think of it as paying for reserved resources. Just like an apartment, where you pay for the rent even if you're using it 0% (e.g. not home).

You can choose to stop the VM at any time, and billing stops, until you start the VM again. This is easily done via PowerShell / CLI, so you can automate it with your own tooling.

Note that VM billing is actually per minute, so if you shut down a VM after 30 minutes, you're not billed for an entire hour.

Only you can decide the proper way to manage your VM's uptime, based on your app's usage. There's no single right answer to that. And there's no mechanism for the VM to sleep if it detects inactivity. That's going to be an application-dependent thing (deciding when to shut down).

David Makogon
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You can also check Azure automation option if you have a definite schedule for the VM to be up and down. Azure automation gives you a way to create a runbook to manage the up time of the VM and also options to do the scheduling. Check this blog for more information https://blogs.endjin.com/2015/01/using-azure-automation-to-run-vms-during-office-hours-only/

Gandhali Samant
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You have a couple of options to correct address this:

  1. You could use automation, where you run a Powershell script to turn you VM off during off-peak time. Check this out:http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/08/20/azure-automation-capabilities-in-depth-the-azure-automation-powershell-cmdlets/

  2. You can setup alerts now in your account portal (yeah, I just said that!) Check it out here: http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/azure-billing-set-up-alerts/

I would look at both. You can shut-down a VM from PowerShell (MS just demonstrated that to me in a workshop this week), so I would use this approach if you know that SSRS is only going to run for a specified window.

Nimantha
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Rogala
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  • Here is the link to shutting down VM with Powershell: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brian_farnhill/archive/2014/01/22/managing-windows-azure-vms-through-powershell.aspx – Rogala May 06 '15 at 00:24