Licensing for Azure Services

• Some Azure resouces requires seperate license for OS. For example Windows VM
• Some services requires subscription or enterprise aggrement licenses to use. For example Azure Universal Print Service, PowerBI services
• Total cost for resources that requires license = (Cost for underlaying infrastructures + License Cost)

What is Volume Licensing?

• In software licensing, a volume licensing is the practice of selling a license authorizing one computer program to be used on a large number of computers or by a large number of users
• “Microsoft Volume Licensing” is a program for customers to buy large number of licenses for Microsoft products
• Purpose of “Microsoft Volume Licensing” : to run software on multiple computers within a single licensing organization

Microsoft volume licensing programs:

• Microsoft Enterprise
• Enterprise Subscription
• Select Plus
• Select
• Academic – Education Enrolment or School Enrolment
• Open Value
• Open Value Subscription
• Open Licenses programs

Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/licensing/

What is Multitenant Hosting Rights?

• Tenant
  • a person who occupies land or property rented from a landlord
  • A tenant is a group of users who share a common access with specific privileges to the software instance
• Multitenancy
  • Software multitenancy is a software architecture in which a single instance of software runs on a server and serves multiple tenants
  • A multi-tenant cloud is a cloud computing architecture that allows customers to share computing resources (cloud infrastructures)
  • In the Multi-Tenant approach the hosted application (SaaS application) serves the needs of a large number of customers using the same instance of the application, partitioning the data for those customers within the application itself
• Azure tenant: a dedicated and trusted instance of Azure AD that’s automatically created when your organization signs up for a Microsoft cloud service subscription, such as Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 etc.
• Multitenant Hosting Rights
  • Eligibility of a license (assigned to a single user) to be used for multiple platform/devices
  • Example:
    • “Windows 10 Enterprise E3/E5 per user” license is assigned to “UserX”
    • “UserX” can use that license for laptop, Azure VM & Azure Virtual Desktop at the same time without purchasing 3 seperate licenses

How to get Multitenant Hosting Rights?

• Examples:
  • Volume Licensing
  • Microsoft 365 Busines Premium
• Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/windows-desktop-multitenant-hosting-deployment

OS Licensing for Compute Services

• OS License cost is either “included in the per-minute cost”, or seperate license is required
• Details: Azure Virtual Machine OS Licensing

Universal Print Service

• Requires elligible subscription or licensing
• License to use Universal Print Service can also be purchased independently
• Details: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/universal-print/fundamentals/universal-print-license