Do Azure VM pricing include storage in the VHD? [closed]

Question

So i'm looking for a cost affective way to host a website in a linux vm. The pricing only states the VM's cpu and RAM. What about the space used up by the OS and apps in the VM as well as the ongoing disk usage? is this an added cost? Whats the size of the disk?

Answer 1

I get tired of going round in circles and getting confused every time (twice now) I set up a new VM. So here's what I've found:

Let's say I choose the DS1_V2 virtual machine, which supports premium (SSD) storage. (This just means the physical azure node with your VM on it allows use of SSD as an drive. I assume all new configurations support SSD and it's just legacy hardware that doesn't but I'm not 100% sure on this.)

The monthly price is currently about $100 for this VM. You only get included what you see here:

So the 7GB local SSD disk size here is included in the $98.95, but you get no other storage. This 7GB vanishes when you reboot anyway so you can't use it for real storage.

When you create a VM you have a choice between HDD and SSD. The 'new VM wizard' encourages you to select SSD but doesn't tell you what pricing that will incur. This I think is very misleading and a source of confusion and probably why you are now reading this.

Anyway - let's say you picked SSD (which I did). You'll get a 127GB drive as your C:\ and the temporary storage in addition as your D:\

In your account portal you will see two items created

To confirm how this drive is configured you must click on it and you'll see something like this :

When you choose an SSD for your operating system it will default to 127GB but you will always pay for the full drive. Note that you can switch between HDD and SSD, but you need to reboot the VM.

The current pricing for 128GB (which is what they call a P10 disk) is $19.97 a month. So the total price for your VM will be fixed at $98.95 + $19.97 a month as long as you use SSD. To put it another way you're paying for a P10 disk that just happens to be used as your VM's operating system.

SSD Drive Pricing

As a comparison for HDD you only pay for what you use. If you used up the whole 127GB you'd be paying around $2.94 extra instead of $19.97. So SSD is really a minor expense but not negligible and certainly NOT included..

HDD Drive Pricing

And then in your billing you will see it listed as P10

I have two VMs set up with SSD so they are charging me $39.47/2 = $19.74 for each one.

Answer 2

EDIT June 27, 2014 - updated pricing to be current (this answer was two years old).

Your Virtual Machines are each stored in blob storage. So, if your machine image takes up, say, 20GB, you are now paying for 20GB of storage (actually, you only pay for storage used within that 20GB disk, as Azure's vhd's are stored in a sparse format).

At 12.5 around 2.4 cents per GB (locally-redundant storage, which you'd use with vhd's), and you actually used all 20GB, you're talking less than 50 cents monthly. You'll also pay a penny half-penny per 100,000 storage transactions. even though your VM disk volume looks like a formatted drive, its underlying storage is Blob Storage; gets and puts result in metered transactions.

More details on storage costs are here.