Introduction
I recently blogged about using a Cloud Management Gateway to serve content for task media support for cloud based content and that blog post got a lot of likes and retweets on Twitter.
In addition, there were several questions including one about the cost of doing these cloud based operating system deployments. This blog post will hopefully assist you with doing just that, finding out how much your Cloud Management Gateway is going to cost for OSD related content (stored on the cloud distribution point in your CMG) using the new features available today in Technical Preview 2005.
The cost of egress
Egress is another way of saying data downloaded (or data out). To figure out the cost, in your Configuration Manager console, take a look at the Administration workspace and select Cloud Services, expand Cloud Management Gateway and select your CMG. In this view, take note of your Total Outbound Data Transfer (GB).
Now that you’ve got that figure, head over to the following Microsoft website.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/bandwidth/
Next using the drop down menus select the Region that corresponds to your CMG’s location (you can see that in the ConfigMgr console, in the Region column) and then select the Currency that you want to use.
You’ll notice that data going into Azure data centers is Free, but data going out (egress) is not. As my content transferred out was approx 14GB I choose the second row which is between 5GB and 10TB per month, at a cost of $0.087 per GB.
Using Windows handy calculator application, the results are shown below.
Yeah that’s not a huge cost ! $1.25 USD, that’s peanuts !!
What about other costs ?
But of course there may be additional costs, and these are detailed here. Remember that a CMG is in itself a virtual machine hosted in Azure.
And within the Configuration Manager console (Technical Preview 2005 screenshot), you can see a cost estimation using the Cloud Cost Estimator. Browse to the Monitoring workspace, select Security and then Cloud Management and in there you’ll have some nice charts and graphs, including a total monthly cost estimate and monthly cost per device.
Note, by default, the tool shows data based on the following settings:
- Only laptop devices
- Client policy only, not content
- 30 days of client usage data
- 10% of the total clients simultaneously communicating with the cloud service
to get a more accurate estimation, click on Options (you may need to increase your monitors resolution to see the popout window). Select your Region and number of CMG’s from the options available, note how the cost changes accordingly.
Note: That 70.73 Euro estimation basically includes the cost of hosting the CMG in the Azure, as it is a Virtual Machine, and it has a fixed cost per month regardless of how much you download or how many clients it supports, so keep that in mind. Also to note, the price of the VM depends on the region you host it in, for example it may cost 71 Euros in North Europe but 83 Euros in West Europe.
This feature is not in production yet (Current Branch release) but is in the Technical Preview releases currently.
I hope you found this helpful
cheers
niall
