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How much does a SharePoint farm in Microsoft Azure cost?

6 Comments

Last month, I created a step by step tutorial on how to Create a SharePoint 2013 Farm in Azure Step by Step by using the new “SharePoint Farm” template in the new (and still beta) Azure portal.

One of the most popular questions I got is how much does a farm in azure cost? So, I decided to sacrifice my monthly Azure credits for the community in order to give you the exact answer.

SharePoint farm in Windows Azure cost

So by using the same step by step I started to create my farm at exactly 1PM on Day 0. I created a SharePoint farm that respects the SharePoint Minimum requirements and should be able to run a good development environment without any problems. At the moment of starting the wizard, I had exactly 157.48$ left on my MSDN Subscription.

DCSQLSharePoint
VM TemplateA1A5A4
RAM1.75 GB14 GB14 GB
Number of Cores128

 

The SharePoint Farm was successfully deployed at 2:18 PM on Day1 and I used it very lightly for about one hour.

In order to determine when exactly my credits finished, I used the email that Azure sends when your credits run out. So, I received the email at 4:48 PM on Day 8. Therefore, 157$ gives us about 194.5 hours of a SharePoint farm in Azure. So, if you work about 9h per day, for 20 days a month, that makes 180h so, provided you turn off your Virtual Machines at night, you should have enough time to run your SharePoint farm for free in Azure!

However, please note that under heavy usage, you might have a lot more bandwidth & storage usage than I did on the farm I barely even played it, so you might get a little less time than I got in this test.

If anyone has other metrics that they took from their experiments with SharePoint in Azure or tips on how to make your SharePoint farm last longer on the credit, please do not hesitate to share!

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6 Comments

  • January 27, 2015 at 2:16 pm
    Eric

    Wow, pretty expensive for bare minimal farm with no CPU and storage use.

    Reply
  • January 28, 2015 at 12:05 pm

    Great way to measure it Vlad! Thanks for spending your MSDN Azure credits for the month on the expiriment. 🙂

    Reply
  • February 12, 2015 at 1:53 pm

    Nice Method! Thanks for spending your credit to come up with some metrics for costs determination. That’s expensive for a company which is spread in different timezones or different coasts.

    Reply
  • February 28, 2015 at 6:17 am
    Bogdan

    I have a couple of vms on azure strictly for development purposes. Some things worth mentioning…

    You could end up cheaper if you build a d4 machine and have everything on it ad sql sp

    After shutting down, starting up an azure vm takes ages…

    You also might lose your assigned external ip

    If its strictly dev youre looking for you can minimize costs on storage by setting local redundancy

    Biggest downside of azure by far is hdd performance. Blob storage sucks and takes time to warm up. Im on tablet and cant find link but you cand Google and it takes around 2 hours to warm up.

    Reply
    • March 10, 2015 at 11:16 am

      For labs Azure is an alternative. For larger workloads Azure may not be the first option. Azure also gets expensive with higher workloads and performance is still not at par when compared to the kind of money that will be doled out. Different providers use different methods to give a more consistent farm performance…

      There are various cloud options to choose from….like Hybrid; Semi-Dedicated SharePoint Farms; Full Fledged Farms; Private Cloud and so on.

      BTW…”losing your external IP”…I have seen that 🙂

      Reply
  • February 27, 2016 at 4:08 pm

    If you need to host heavy workloads or let’s call it more traditional workloads in Azure I would recommend switching to an Enterprise Agreement (EA). This gives you a much better prices instead of using the Pay as you go option. Also Office365 and a hosted Sharepoint could be an alternative. To stay in control of all this costs I use my own tool https://azure-costs.com.

    Reply

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