Category: Microsoft

This category is for anything Microsoft related-so you’ll probably find that msot posts end up in here!

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Microsoft Fabric licensing & pricing


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Microsoft Build 2023 saw the announcement of Microsoft Fabric – “an end-to-end, unified analytics platform that brings together all the data and analytics tools that organizations need” by combining various products including Power BI, Azure Synapse Analytics, and Azure Data Factory.

Additionally, “Fabric comes with a SaaS, multi-cloud data lake called OneLake that is built-in and automatically available to every Fabric tenant. All Fabric workloads are automatically wired into OneLake, just like all Microsoft 365 applications are wired into OneDrive. “

To get more info about what Fabric is, check out the MS post here. To learn more about the licensing and pricing, read on 😊

Microsoft Fabric licensing

Microsoft Fabric takes its licensing model, and some of its terminology, from Power BI Premium which means parts of this may be familiar to you.

Each organisation must have 1 x “organisational” license and at least 1 x “individual” license and each subscription is broken down into tenants, capacities, and workspaces.

Organisational licenses

These provide the infrastructure for Microsoft Fabric – effectively this is what gets things provisioned in Azure so you have something to access/work with. There are 2 types which follow the Power BI Premium pattern:

Capacity – This provisions a set of resources in Azure with different SKUS providing different amounts of capacity, cores, RAM etc.

Premium Per User – Gives per-user access to Power BI elements on Microsoft Fabric, with shared capacity only.

Capacity SKUs

SKUCapacity UnitsPAYG (Hourly)PAYG (Monthly)Power BI SKUsPower BI v-cores
F2*2$0.36$262.80N/A0.25
F4*4$0.72$525.60N/A0.5
F8*8$1.44$1,051.20EM1/A11
F16*16$2.88$2,102.40EM2/A22
F32*32$5.76$4,204.80EM3/A34
F6464$11.52$8,409.60P1/A48
F128128$23.04$16,819.20P2/A516
F256256$46.08$33,638.40P3/A632
F512512$92.16$67,276.80P4/A764
F10241024$184.32$134,553.60P5/A8128
F20482048$368.64$269,107.20N/A256
Pricing of Fabric capacity SKUs at US west 2

*SKUs smaller than F64 require all users, including those consuming content, to be licensed with a Power BI Pro license.

  • The Azure “F” SKUs are billed PAYG per second
  • The P SKUs are billed monthly/annually with a monthly commitment and support Fabric being enabled on top of the Power BI subscription.
  • The EM SKUs do not support Fabric.

Individual licenses

Free – This allows users with access to Fabric capacity to create and share Fabric content

Pro – Required to create, share, and in some cases consume, Power BI content

This appears to show a differentiation between “Fabric content” and “Power BI content” – even if the Power BI content is being created within Fabric 🤔

Pricing and costs

As well as the SKU pricing above, there will also be additional costs for OneLake storage. Again based on costs in US West, the price is:

$0.023 per GB per month

That equals $23 per TB per month ($276 annually). 500TB of data in Fabric OneLake will be $138,000 per year and I feel like that’s probably a low amount of data for many organisations.

There are also potential bandwidth costs as data is accessed and moved between regions:

Managing these resources and costs can be done through a combination of the Fabric portal and Azure Cost Management:

Furthermore, Azure Reservations (Reserved Instances) are planned for later in 2023 which will make the Fabric capacity pricing comparable to the Power BI capacity pricing.

Microsoft resources

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/fabric/enterprise/licenses

https://blog.fabric.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-fabric-capacities-are-available-for-purchase

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Microsoft Copilot licensing details


Microsoft Copilot licensing details are here!

While we’re still awaiting the full release, which could be July 1st or perhaps during Microsoft Inspire later that month, we do have more information available.

Eligible base licenses are:

Microsoft 365 E3
Microsoft 365 E5
Microsoft 365 Business Standard
Microsoft 365 Business Premium

And users need to have an Azure AD account too. This is a clear indication that Copilot will be an extra add-on license.

Furthermore, their M365 Apps must be on “Current Channel” or the “Monthly Enterprise Channel” to access Co-pilot.

I haven’t seen any indication of pricing yet but I’m thinking perhaps £10 for E3 and £5 for E5? With some promos at first of course.

*Update* It turns out I was way off base! Microsoft have confirmed the price is $30 per user per month. More info and examples here.

See the MS post here: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/microsoft-365-copilot/how-to-prepare-for-microsoft-365-copilot/ba-p/3851566

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Microsoft Financial Results: Q3 FY23


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Microsoft announced their Q3 FY23 (Jan – Mar 23) results recently – let’s take a look at the numbers.

Overall revenue for the quarter was $52.9 billion – an increase of 7% while net income was up 9% to $18.3 billion. The latter something of a turnaround from the 12% decrease the previous quarter.

Productivity & Business Processes

Revenue = $17.5 billion…up 11%

  • Office 365 Commercial up 14%
  • LinkedIn up 8%
  • Dynamics up 25%

A little higher than Q2 but still lower than we’ve been seeing for the last couple of years.

Intelligent Cloud

Revenue = $22.1 billion…up 16%

Azure growth was 27% again, a decent increase but continuing the ongoing shrinking of the percentage increase each quarter.

Earnings Call

Satya Nadella stated that Microsoft continue to focus on 3 priorities:

  • Helping customers to get the most value out of their digital spend
  • Investing in AI to increase their Total Addressable Market (TAM) and be the leader
  • Aligning their cost structure with their revenue growth

We are now in the era of ChatGPT and AI – an area where Microsoft are expected to do very well in the coming months and years – and Nadella stated in the earnings call that they have over 2,500 Open AI Azure customers which is a 10x quarter on quarter increase. He also mentioned that ChatGPT runs on top of Microsoft’s CosmosDB.

Further updates include:

  • Azure Arc is up to 15,000+ customers which is 150% up year on year (YoY).
  • Power Platform is up to 33 million Monthly Active Users (MAU) – almost 50% up YoY.
  • Teams has broken the 300 million MAU mark.
  • Almost 60% of Enterprise customers are buying Teams Phone, Teams Rooms, and/or Teams Premium.
  • Almost 600,000 customers have deployed at least 4 Microsoft security workloads – a 35% YoY increase.
  • Amy Hood stated that, at the end of April 23, total headcount was 9% more than a year prior.

Satya mentioned Copilot several times and, in response to an analyst question, stated that:

“We do plan to monetize a separate set of meters across all of the tech stack, whether they’re consumption meters or per-user subscriptions. The copilot that’s priced, and it is there, is GitHub Copilot. That’s a good example of incrementally how we monetize the price lists out there, and others are to be priced, because we are in preview mode. But you can expect us to do what we’ve done with GitHub Copilot pretty much across the board”

Satya Nadella, Q3 FY23 earnings call

and that gives a good idea of what Copilot licensing may look like. I think my expectation of add-ons to E3 and E5 is pretty accurate.

While Microsoft’s revenue and profits are looking great, and they’re excited about all the growth ahead of them, the shine is dimmed somewhat by 2 things: the memory of the layoffs of circa 10,000 staff in January and the recent news that there are to be no pay raises across Microsoft. Give the increases in cost of living, energy, and inflation – wages staying flat can be seen as a pay cut in many ways.

You can see all the details here.

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Microsoft Product Terms: May 2023


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Not much happening in May, this month we saw:

  • Windows To Go terms removed
  • Microsoft Managed Desktop added to the Microsoft 365 Cross-tenant User Data Migration License Prerequisites list
  • OpenAI and Azure Machine learning added to the “Azure Core Services” list and Viva Insights added to the “Microsoft 365 Core Services” list

Products in the Core Services lists will store data at rest in the same geo as the service is deployed, part of Microsoft’s data privacy practices.

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Microsoft Windows 365 Frontline


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Windows 365 Frontline is a new licensing option for Microsoft’s Cloud PC offering, aimed at “Frontline” workers who don’t need constant access to their own PC. This can be scenarios such as:

  • Staff on rota
  • Staff across timezones
  • Part-time staff

Licensing

Each W365 Frontline license allows 3 Cloud PCs virtual machines to be provisioned, but they cannot be used concurrently. The maximum active number of Frontline VMs allowed is equal to the number of licenses you’ve purchased i.e. you’ve bought 20 licenses which enables 60 VMs…but only 20 can be in use at any one time.

W365 Frontline introduces the concept of concurrent licensing – rather than licensing ever shift worker, you instead buy enough licenses to cover the maximum number of desktops active at any one time. For example, 300 users who work in 3 shifts of 100 users = 100 licenses needed.

From a management perspective, the licenses will not show as assigned to users (as they are applied at the tenant level) so you will need to use the W365 utilization report to see how many licenses are being used.

Learn more here – https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-365/enterprise/introduction-windows-365-frontline and https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2023/04/06/windows-365-offers-flexibility-from-the-office-or-home-to-the-frontline/

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Microsoft Product Terms: April 2023


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It’s the Microsoft Product Terms updates for April 2023 and, to paraphrase Puff Daddy and the Bad Boy Family…it’s all about Windows Server baby!

Some key changes that help to harmonise licensing across different platforms, which is a benefit for all of us involved!

Azure Hybrid Benefit for Windows Server changes:

No longer need to allocate 16 licenses as a minimum
No longer have to assign stacked licenses in groups of 8
Confirms minimum of 8 core licenses for AHB VM

Licensing Win Svr by individual virtual OSE:

No longer need to allocate 16 licenses as a minimum
CSP customers with Standard licenses can use Datacenter images as guests when licensing by virtual OSE – but must follow Standard edition use rights

CSP-Hoster:

Customers do not need Windows Server CALs or External Connector licenses when accessing “server software acquired from, fulfilled, and hosted by a Cloud Solution Provider-Hoster”.

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Microsoft VLSC features move to M365 Admin Center


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It’s been a while since there’s been much to say about the good old VLSC (Volume Licensing Service Center) – it’s been ticking along for years – but there is an update now. Many of its volume licensing features are being moved to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center (MAC), this includes:

  • Downloads and keys
  • License Summary
  • Relationship Summary

Note the latter two will both be found under “Contracts” in the M365 Admin Center.

This means customers will have one place to manage their VL and Subscription licenses…will the MPSA Business Center be merged too?

You can see more info from Microsoft here.

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Microsoft make more layoffs


Microsoft have announced plans to cut a further 10,000 jobs – a shade under 5% of their total workforce. As with previous rounds of job cuts, Satya Nadella has stated they’ll continue to hire in other “key strategic areas” likely including AI and platforms.

Microsoft will see $1.2 billion in charges in Q2 from these layoffs and also “changes to [the] hardware portfolio”.

This is part of a wider trend of layoffs across the industry recently including:

  • Alphabet = 12,000
  • Amazon = 18,000
    Salesforce = 8,000
    Meta = 11,000

as the tech industry boom comes to a halt and companies look to re-focus and prioritise. Google have said that they expanded to quickly during the pandemic and now need to rationalise their workforce.

It will be interesting to see which areas within Microsoft see the brunt of these cuts, as that will really give insight into how they’re reshaping their business.

I wish everyone affected by this the best of luck.

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Microsoft Product Terms – December 2022


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Clarification to the Online Services “Acceptable Use Policy” that crypto-mining is prohibited without Microsoft’s prior approval. I wonder when they will give permission for this?!

DevOps Server 2022 added

A clarification notice around Microsoft’s communication services, relating to taxes and relations to 3rd-party services.

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SQL Server 2022 – price rises & licensing changes


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SQL Server 2022 is now generally available and is, in Microsoft’s words, the “most Azure enabled release” so far.

https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2022/11/16/sql-server-2022-is-now-generally-available/

There are a few licensing updates and changes to be aware of with SQL Server 2022 as well as a price increase:

Flexible Virtualisation Benefit

Both licenses with active SA and active subscriptions can now be deployed with any Authorized Outsourcer – that is, anyone who isn’t a Listed Provider (Amazon, Google, Alibaba). However, don’t forget that License Mobility through Software Assurance rights still exist (via SA) which allow you to put software on the servers of an “Authorised Mobility Partner” – and the Listed Providers are eligible for this.

Furthermore, when licensing SQL Server Standard or Enterprise by virtual OSE, if you have active SA you can run an unlimited number of containers containing SQL Server within that virtual OSE.

Related to this, Microsoft have made another change that will cause some issues for certain customers. Licensing a virtual machine based on the number of virtual cores now requires Software Assurance with SQL 2022 and, as that is the only option available for licensing virtual machines with SQL Server Std 2022 (i.e. you can’t license the physical hardware to then run VMs), this means that Software Assurance is a requirement if you have virtual machines with SQL Server Std per core.

Machine Learning removal

Looking at the Product terms, it appears that Microsoft have removed the rights for SQL Server Enterprise customers to use:

  • Machine Learning for Window or Linux
  • Machine Learning Server for Hadoop

PAYG licensing

Enabled via Azure Arc, this new billing model enables organisations to pay for SQL Server on a monthly or hourly basis:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sql-server/sql-server-2022-pricing#tabx58bf128753034847a6690344bce5c2d7

The servers must be connected to Azure Arc to use this option. For 2022, the Arc connection is a default part of the setup process while for SQL 2014 and above, it will be enabled via a capability within the Azure portal which is, according to Microsoft, coming soon. This seems to suggest that PAYG isn’t available with SQL 2012 or earlier which makes sense, given they’re all out of support.

See more on SQL PAYG here and the pricing is here.

New pricing

Microsoft have confirmed that SQL Server 2022 Standard, Enterprise, and Web pricing will increase by 10% from January 2023 – including public sector.

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