Red Hat Enterprise Linux reservations

What is Red Hat Enterprise Linux?

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by Red Hat for the commercial market.

Let’s see what discounts Azure provides in this space!

There are three types of reservations (based on the VM Size):

Red Hat Enterprise Linux only offers a One Year term as an option and it only covers the software piece; you will have to reserve the virtual machine separately.

Instance size flexibility is supported for this Red Hat Enterprise Linux reservations (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/reserved-vm-instance-size-flexibility#instance-size-flexibility-ratio-for-vms).

Let’s have a look at the discounts (discount compared to Retail Pay-As-You-Go):

One Year term:

• 1-4 vCPU VM – 20%
• 5+ vCPU VM – 20%
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux for ARM64 BYOS – Pricing not available at the time of writing

If you have a 4 vCPU VM, you should purchase the 1-4 vCPU VM.

If you have a 8 vCPU VM, you should purchase the 5+ vCPU VM.

20% is a pretty good discount for licensing; it’d be great if there was a three year option with a 35-40% discount as many RHEL workloads are long-running and not going away anytime soon.