>> Learn about centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit
that's new this week on Data Exposed.
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>> Hi, I'm Anna Hoffman,
and welcome to this episode of Data Exposed.
Today I'm joined by Chris from business planning.
Chris, thanks so much for joining us today.
Can you tell us a little bit about what you do?
>> Thanks Anna. Sure. I work in business planning
and one of the things I focus on is
trying to make Azure the best
experience for Windows Server and SQL Server.
>> Awesome. Cool. It seems like
a great person to have on Data Exposed talking
about SQL Server and things like Azure Hybrid Benefit.
Before we get into what's new,
can you tell us a little bit about what is Azure Hybrid Benefit?
Sure. Azure Hybrid Benefit is a licensing benefit that
you get when you buy Windows Server and SQL Server
licenses with Software Assurance or within
a subscription and it lets you apply
those licenses to Azure and then reduce your costs.
>> Awesome. Sounds pretty good.
How does it work and how do I go
about actually getting Azure Hybrid Benefit?
>> Yes, it works like this.
You apply licenses to resources like VMs or
SQL databases and when you do that it reduces the hourly rate.
It basically takes the software part out
and that will reduce the cost and
even if you add the cost of the licenses back
in it's still lower price than the full hourly rates.
The way you apply it is actually whenever
a DevOps person creates a VM or a SQL DB,
it'll check a check box in the UX or more
likely they'll use command line interface or
API to script it out
and they'll select the benefit on the resource.
>> This sounds pretty good, pretty straightforward.
It looks like this is done on a per resource basis.
Are there any challenges associated with this?
>> Yes. The way things work
today these are DevOps roles that do this.
It's done at the level of each resource and customers have
told us that it's cumbersome to
manage that by resource
and then the other problem that they've told us is
those resources may not have awareness of
license availability and so there's concerns about compliance.
>> Got it. Yeah, fhat definitely seems like
a challenge especially when you talk about having, I don't know,
hundreds of SQL Servers and trying to manage those licensing,
just managing the AHB and then making sure you're in compliance.
What are we doing to make this a better experience?
>> Yes, we heard the feedback and we created
a new way to manage
Azure Hybrid Benefit that addresses those problems.
Essentially what it is it allows
a different billing admin type person to
assign licenses in larger blocks at
the overall account level
or at a subscription level and you can assign
even one license assignment to
your account level and that could cover all your licenses.
So it's definitely more scalable.
>> Awesome. Very cool. How do I go through it?
How does it work and do you have
any tips for folks just getting started?
>> Sure. It's probably easiest to
look at the experience itself from the portal,
so I'll do that.
The first thing I'll share is how you get to it.
After an admin logs in they will click on "Cost Management. "
Then they'll see this and they'll click on "Billing
Scopes" and then they'll select "The scope."
Then they will select "Reservations
Plus Hybrid Benefit" on the left nav bar
and click "Add Azure Hybrid Benefit Preview' so you
can see this is [inaudible] reservations under cost management.
When they do that they'll get to the landing page
here or centrally managed Azure Hybrid Benefit.
What's on this screen it covers
the Azure Hybrid Benefit itself like we
did a couple minutes ago and introduces this feature.
Then it also includes you can see in the blue
here that prerequisite that's
necessary and that is making sure you
register all of your self-installed SQL Server
virtual machines that lets you or the customer and the system
see all those and that way you
make sure to assign enough licenses.
Once that's all done and you begin to assign licenses,
and this is the main screen where all the magic happens.
There's really just a two-steps.
There's choosing a scope and that's
either the whole account or including
all the subscriptions in that account
or a specific single subscription.
That's the first step. Then assign licenses.
You can see that you can assign the standard edition licenses,
an enterprise edition licenses.
These are all fungible together and so we
have a concept of normalized licenses and the way that
works is one standard license equals one normalized core license
and one enterprise license equals four normalized licenses.
You do that math and you get
a total set of normalized core licenses.
The experience actually you can see in the blue here,
it actually does some great work and gives you
a currently detected usage amount both for Azure Hybrid Benefit,
how many check boxes are checked that we
looked at a few minutes ago and then also
how many overall resources and
cores for compatible resources are running?
It gives you that information and then you can use that as well
as work behind the scenes to
make a decision about how many licenses to assign.
In this case, the customer has decided to
assign 200 standard licenses and
100 enterprise licenses for a total of 600 normalized.
That's quite a bit more
than the detected usage that you see in the blue,
and so what that tells us is this customer
probably is expecting to increase their usage coming up,
maybe they have a bunch of migrations
or they would have a bunch of new projects and they're
going to be creating new resources from those.
Then after you've done that you have
the opportunity to create customized names.
Then the final step before applying
these is there's a little attestation that basically says,
"I have permission to do this,
I can represent my company and we have the licenses."
You click on that and the license assignment is created.
Once those license assignments are out
there you can go back to that Reservations
plus Hybrid Benefit page and you'll see this table and within
that table you'll see a row for every one of
those license assignments like
the one that was just created in the demo.
You'll see a utilization number for
the previous day and the previous seven days.
This tells you how many of those licenses
on an ongoing basis are being used.
The way to think about utilization is,
this is the detail screen by the way,
if you click on one of those rows then you can get to this screen.
If your utilization is less than 100 percent that means you
have more than enough licenses
assigned to cover all the resources.
If that number approaches 100 percent or actually
gets to 100 percent then the admin will
want to consider talking to
the procurement department and
acquiring some more licenses and assigning them.
Then that way all the resources can be
covered and you can maximize the cost savings.
That's really it. As far as the demo you can see a link there on
the right-hand side as well if
you are looking for more information.
>> Thanks, Chris. This is super useful to
see and it's really interesting how it's going to
make it so much easier for customers to manage
across their Azure SQL [inaudible].
One follow up question I had and you've showed
us about SQL Server on Azure virtual machine
but I want to understand, can I use this centrally manage
Azure Hybrid Benefit for Azure SQL
paths services like Azure SQL Database
and Azure SQL Managed Instance?
>> Yeah, you can use it for VMs.
You can use it for paths,
SQL DB, SQL MI.
Yeah, it goes across all those different Azure SQL resources.
>> Awesome. Cool. That's great. I really
have one place to manage all of
my licenses across all of my Azure SQL resources.
Thanks so much Chris. This has been really useful.
To our viewers, we're going to put some links in
the description so you can go learn more
and figure out how to get this
enabled for your subscription in your organization.
We hope this video was useful.
If you like this video go ahead and give
it a like, leave us a comment,
and let us know that you're using Azure Hybrid Benefit
and we hope to see you next time on Data Exposed.
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