Did you know there are 25 different services offered as part of the Microsoft Azure platform? These services span a variety of areas – Compute & Networking, Web & Mobile, Data & Analytics, Storage & Backup, Media & CDN, Hybrid Integration, and Identity & Access Management. Quite the set of tools!
When deciding whether to migrate some or all of these workloads to the cloud, you will want to know an estimate of what that will cost you. Some services, such as storage, are easy to price if you have a defined input – $.28 per GB per month is the current listed price. (view Pricing Calculator here)
But what about services that use bandwidth? Or what if you don’t have a defined amount of storage, for instance your storage needs vary month to month. How do you estimate your current usage? What if I have a large, 13 server SharePoint farm, how would I possibly know what my usage will be? As Azure has matured, these questions have been asked of us at Perficient more frequently.
Today, Microsoft has released a new tool to help us understand those costs – the Azure (IaaS) Cost Estimator tool V1.0!
The tool helps:
- Identify the utilization and resource allocation on physical machines as well as guest VMs running on VMware and Hyper-V.
- Determine the cost of running an on-premises physical or virtual machine workload on Azure for 30 days
The tool works by connecting to a server and scanning the hardware and resource utilization over a period of time. The resultant server profile is then matched against Azure IaaS instance types to determine the best fit with an option to optimize for cost or performance. The final cost estimate also includes storage transactions and bandwidth costs, which are normally difficult to estimate. The tool supports the most common on-premises platforms including VMware (vSphere and ESXi), Microsoft (SCVMM and Hyper-V) and physical machines (Windows Server 2003 and later, Linux). No information is sent outside of your premises at any time.
While the tool provides a cost estimate, it does not provide application compatibility information. It complements other third party migration and optimization tools such as the ones provided by AppZero, Vision Solutions, and Cloudamize.
Features:
- Quick (install and run a single profile scan in 15 minutes)
- Exports output to Excel /.CSV for discussion with us here at Perficient
- Maintains privacy (no data is sent outside your domain at any time)
Download the latest version – http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=43376
For help with installing the tool, evaluating cloud workloads, or any other Azure services, please contact us at Perficient!
