Today Microsoft released to General Availability the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) side of Windows Azure.  This includes Virtual Machines and Virtual Networking.  Read complete details of the release here.

This is a huge milestone for BizTalk’ers because with the GA release we now have available on a per-per-hour basis both BizTalk Server 2013 Standard and Enterprise Editions.  This opens up a whole new spectrum of scenarios using this per-per-use model. 

We now have 3 new pre-built images for BizTalk 2013 available in the Image Gallery.  They include a BizTalk Evaluation, BizTalk Standard, and BizTalk Enterprise editions.  As best I can tell, the BizTalk Evaluation is just charged at the base rate of the VM.  The other two editions are more expensive.  They are priced as shown in the table below but they include the license to BizTalk.

COMPUTE INSTANCE NAME

VIRTUAL CORES

RAM

STANDARD

ENTERPRISE

Small (A1)

1

1.75 GB

$0.75/hr
(~$558/month)

$2.99/hr
(~$2,225/month)

Medium (A2)

2

3.5 GB

$0.84/hr
(~$625/month)

$3.08/hr
(~$2,292/month)

Large (A3)

4

7 GB

$1.02/hr
(~$759/month)

$3.26/hr
(~$2,425/month)

Extra Large (A4)

8

14 GB

$2.04/hr
(~$1,518/month)

$6.52/hr
(~$4,851/month)

COMPUTE INSTANCE NAME

VIRTUAL CORES

RAM

STANDARD

ENTERPRISE

A6

4

28 GB

$1.68/hr
(~$1,250/month)

$3.92/hr
(~$2,916/month)

A7

8

56 GB

$3.36/hr
(~$2,500/month)

$7.84/hr
(~$5,833/month)

Pricing current as of 4-16-13 per the Azure Pricing Page.

I have already played around with the Enterprise Edition running as a Small VM.  I would say, don’t even bother with this size.  If you want to give it a run, go right to the Large.  The few cents I saved per hour was more than eaten up with latency and overall general slowness of the small VM instance.  Giving the few cents price difference between Small and Large, I’ve surprised Small and Medium are even an option.  I also do not know how this pricing relates to any free usage you might get in the 90 day trial or MSDN.

CRITICAL – please remember you are charged for a VM even when it is STOPPED.  So if you create a Large BizTalk Enterprise VM you are charged until you DELETE the VM.

Let me know if you have played around with these new VM’s and what you think of them!  More to come on BizTalk and IaaS in the upcoming months.