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Azure Maximums and Resource Usage from PowerShell

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Technorati Tags: Azure,PowerShell

Have you ever struggled to find out how many VM cores, HDInsight cores, storage accounts, or other Azure resources your subscription is set to allow or how many you actually use? Maybe you want to use this information in your automation scripts to avoid trying to create components for which you don’t have resources.

quizzical owl

PowerShell to the rescue!

First a couple of key points. There are various maximums in Azure. Today we are talking about finding the currently configured maximums allowed for a specified subscription. There are default maximums (default limit) which you can increase for a given subscription by opening a billing support ticket. There are also hard maximums (maximum limit). However, with some products, such as HDInsight (Hadoop), you can get past some per-subscription maximums for dependent services by combining resources (storage accounts) from multiple subscriptions for a single HDInsight cluster. All the samples below find the current billing quota limitation and actual usage for the current subscription.

Let’s take a look at the information available on the subscription level cmdlet.

Start by checking which subscription is in focus / current for the PowerShell session.

(Get-AzureSubscription -Current).SubscriptionName

(Get-AzureSubscription -Current).CurrentStorageAccountName

If you need information on a different subscription either pass the subscription name (as defined on your client) for the cmdlets that support this or change the focus to a different subscription.

$SubName = "sqlcatwoman"

Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $SubName

Now we will look at the cores available for Azure virtual machines (VMs / IaaS). Note that HDInsight cores are tracked separately. Be careful with unexpected line wraps that may paste into your PowerShell window (or ISE) incorrectly. The below snippet is 1 comment line and 4 lines of code.

# How many cores are available to create new VMs (or increase size of existing VMs) for the current subscription?

[int]$maxVMCores     = (Get-AzureSubscription -current -ExtendedDetails).maxcorecount

[int]$currentVMCores = (Get-AzureSubscription -current -ExtendedDetails).currentcorecount

[int]$availableCores = $maxVMCores - $currentVMCores

Write-Host "Cores available for VMs:" $availableCores

We can get similar information about cloud services:

#how many cloud (hosted) services are available on this subscription

[int]$maxAvl         = (Get-AzureSubscription -current -ExtendedDetails).MaxHostedServices

[int]$currentUsed    = (Get-AzureSubscription -current -ExtendedDetails).CurrentHostedServices

[int]$availableNow   = $maxAvl - $currentUsed

Write-Host "Cloud services available:" $availableNow

Some limits and usage are available on cmdlets specific to a particular technology. For example, the HDInsight usage and maximums are available from the Get-AzureHDInsightProperties cmdlet. You can find details and samples on Get HDInsight Properties with PowerShell.

Other times we have to look at different cmdlets for different pieces of the information, such as for storage accounts:

#how many storage accounts are available on this subscription

[int]$maxAvl         = (Get-AzureSubscription -current -ExtendedDetails).MaxStorageAccounts

[int]$currentUsed    = (Get-AzureStorageAccount).Count

[int]$availableNow   = $maxAvl - $currentUsed

Write-Host "Storage Accounts available:" $availableNow

We can look at all the extended properties available for a subscription:happy owl

Get-AzureSubscription -current –ExtendedDetails

If you know you have a particular component created and this cmdlet shows the “Current” value is zero, take a look at the Get-Azure… cmdlet for that particular type of resource and look for a “Current” value.

Another handy thing to look at is the overall information about what Azure regions exist and what services are available in each region:

Get-AzureLocation 

And you can pull off specific information:

Get-AzureLocation  | Select DisplayName

I hope these small bites of PowerShell help save the day for you in some way!

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 14, 2015
    Very Useful information, Thanks

  • Anonymous
    February 10, 2016
    I know this is an old thread, but do you know if there is an equivalent for this "Get-AzureSubscription -current –ExtendedDetails " with the new AzureRM for PS 5?  I am working to migrate over to AzureRM and this is eluding me.