I am happy to share the information about a new feature of Azure Reserved Instances (Azure RI) called instance size flexibility that became GA few days ago.
It means that your VMs with smaller instance sizes automatically share larger Azure Reserved Instance sizes between each other to make use of unused Azure Reserved Instances, e.g. two Azure VMs with sizes of D2s_v3 share one unused D4s_v3. In this case both VMs can make use of one Azure RI. This feature can only be applied to instance sizes within the same size series group (see below). In addition, this feature is enabled by default.
The benefit of this feature is that you do not have to revoke unused Azure RIs and repurchasing them with the needed instance size as you did before. Now, you can save money and bring a smile into your finance department’s employees.
See below links if you would like to read more about this feature.
Official Microsoft blog post:
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/general-availability-of-instance-size-flexibility-for-azure-reserved-virtual-machine-instances/
Overview of instance size series groups:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/reserved-vm-instance-size-flexibility
Azure Instance Size Flexibility for Azure Reserved Instance General is GA Now
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