Public Preview Announcement-On Demand Capacity Reservation in Azure in China

Today, we're announcing the public preview of on demand capacity reservations for Azure Virtual Machines in Azure in China Cloud . You can now manage and reserve capacity with guaranteed SLA for VM sizes available on Azure in China Cloud. The feature is not available yet in China North and China East regions.

As part of our ongoing commitment to expanding our global reach and providing On Demand Capacity Reservation benefits to our customers, we have diligently worked hard for months to bring this feature to Azure in China Cloud.

On-demand capacity reservations can be leveraged in the following scenarios and beyond for the cloud:

• Business-critical applications — use on-demand capacity reservations to protect capacity, for example when taking these VMs offline to perform updates.
• Disaster recovery (DR) — set aside compute capacity to ensure a seamless recovery in the event of a natural disaster. The compute capacity can be repurposed to run other workloads whenever DR is not in effect.
• Special events—claiming capacity ahead of time provides assurance that your business can handle the extra demand.

The feature is available to be used on Azure in China Cloud through Portal as well as clients like Powershell, CLI and REST API.

On demand capacity reservations come with a capacity SLA. Unused reserved capacity and Virtual Machines using reserved capacity are both eligible for Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instance term discounts.

Existing and Future capabilities

The basic capability to use On Demand Capacity Reservation feature is available in public preview in Azure in China except for the regions China North and China East. Support for China North and China East and integration with Azure Site Recovery with On-Demand Capacity Reservation for the cloud will come at a later release.

The VM deployment methods supported with on demand capacity reservations are single VMs and Virtual Machine Scale Sets using uniform orchestration mode. Please read the documentation to learn more.

Resources to get started

There are two demonstration videos currently available:

• Basic feature operation and use with single VM deployments.
• Detailed feature operation and integration with Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

Additionally, you can read the on demand capacity reservation documentation that includes sample code.