New role instance allocation

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Since we launched the Windows Azure CTP last year up until yesterday, a regular Windows Azure token would grant you the following Windows Azure assets:

  • 2 storage accounts
  • 1 hosted service
    • with 2 deployment slots,
    • each with up to 5 roles (any combination of web or worker roles),
    • each with up to 2 instances,
  • which meant that you had up to 20 VMs (2 * 5 * 2) to play with, and the VMs were not weighed.

As of yesterday, in preparation for the Windows Azure Commercial Launch announced at PDC'09, we are setting the default limit to 8 cores and we’ll be counting the role instances as weighted.

A regular token will now give you a limit of 8 cores, and you will be able to use those 8 cores in any combination you want for your hosted service.

The weighed core allocation per VM size is as follows:

  • Small VM = 1 core
  • Medium VM = 2 cores
  • Large VM = 4 cores
  • Extra Large = 8 cores

If your compute app is currently running with a higher number of cores than 8, you will need to decrease your app size to come into the new quota and redeploy it.