Easy Guide to Your Azure Subscription

An Azure subscription is a base container that comprises a group of related business or technical resources. The group of resources are used and billed together. An Azure subscription also acts as an administrative boundary, meaning that it allows subscription administrators to access all resources within the subscription and delegate access through role-based access-control mechanisms.

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What Is an Azure Subscription?

An Azure subscription is mandatory when you are using Azure resources. An Azure resource is a manageable item like a database, web application, virtual network, virtual machine (VM) or storage account that is available on Azure. A subscription authenticates and authorizes you to use these resources. An Azure subscription links to an Azure account, which in turn is an identity in Azure Active Directory (AD). Hence, a subscription is an agreement between an organization and Microsoft to use resources, for which charges are either paid on a per-license basis or a cloud-based, resource-consumption basis.

An Azure account can have multiple subscriptions with different access management policies and different billing procedures. An Azure subscription can be used to define the following boundaries:

How Do Accounts, Tenants and Azure Active Directory Relate to Subscriptions?

Azure charges for the services it offers to organizations. Each organization is given an Azure AD Tenant, can create Azure Accounts, and can create different subscriptions for the use of different services. These terminologies are defined below:

Now that you understand the terminology, you can learn the relation between accounts, tenants and subscriptions:

How Can You Use Azure Subscriptions to Scale the Environment?

To avoid per-subscription limits, organizations often use multiple Azure subscriptions. There are several strategies that you can adopt to ensure that your Azure subscription scales the environment and manages Azure resources effectively.

Once you create your initial subscriptions, depending on the model of your organization, you can create additional subscriptions to scale your environment. Before you scale your subscriptions:

There are multiple strategies that can help you decide on how to purchase and design additional Azure subscriptions. A few are listed here:

Azure Subscription: Transferring to a Different Azure Active Directory

Each Azure subscription is associated with an Azure AD. If you have a huge number of subscriptions, you might want to transfer some into a different Azure AD. Transferring a subscription can lead to potential downtime, so you can consider alternate approaches like re-creating the resources and copying data to the target subscription or adopting a multi-directory architecture. This is because there are significant impacts of transferring subscriptions to a different Azure AD for the following services:

If you still want to move forward with the transfer, follow the steps mentioned below:

  1. Sign in to the source directory as an administrator.
  1. Install the Azure Resource Graph extension to query the resources managed by Azure Resource Manager.
  1. Save all the role assignments as JSON, TSV or table format.
  1. Save all the custom roles.
  1. Determine the mappings for your users, groups and services.
  1. List the role assignments for the managed identities.
  1. List all the Key Vaults, Azure SQL databases with Azure AD authentication, Access Control Lists (ACLs) and other known resources.
  1. Transfer the subscription, and then re-create the custom roles and role assignments.
  1. Update system-assigned managed identities, user-assigned managed identities, Key Vaults, ACLs and review other security methods.

Parallels RAS Supports Azure as a VDI Provider

Parallels® Remote Application Server (RAS) is a virtualization tool that delivers desktops and applications to end users effectively. Parallels RAS supports Microsoft Azure Hypervisor as a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) provider. This allows organizations to provision and scale VDI workloads on-demand directly on Microsoft Azure, rendering faster deployments and simplifying management. Moreover, by integrating with Windows Virtual Desktop, Parallels RAS unifies all virtual workloads and resources into one.

Enhance the flexibility of VDI and Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) deployments by mixing and matching on-premises, hybrid and public cloud environments. The built-in automation capabilities of Parallels RAS simplify its deployment and configuration in the Azure cloud. It includes prebuilt Azure virtual machine (VM) templates and configuration wizards, enabling a Parallels RAS appliance to be fully configured in under 30 minutes.

Download the trial version of Parallels RAS to reap the benefits today!