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Activating your 5 free Azure Accounts on BizSpark

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[Please note that this post is quite out of date in that some of the interfaces and the programme itself have changed. A lot of the content will still be useful so I am keeping the post alive but please be aware of the changes]

The BizSpark programme provides many benefits to start-ups including access to all of our software for DEV and Test as well as production licenses for certain products. Along with this, start-ups can access our public cloud platform, Azure, and can use up to $150 per month. All of these benefits are available for up to 5 people within the organisation.

The Azure platform can be used for hosting websites, cloud services or virtual machines or for any of the application services like SQL database, Hadoop, machine learning, mobile services and many more. Whether your are building your apps in Php, Java, Ruby, .NET or Node.js and targeting the browser or iOS, Android or Windows apps, Azure has everything you need, even a number of Linux distributions.

First things first, join BizSpark – its free

To get started, join the BizSpark programme, log on to www.bizspark.com and follow the instructions. Once we have approved your application you can follow these steps to activate your Azure subscriptions and start deploying your applications to the cloud:

You can get more information on your benefits here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/offers/ms-azr-0064p/

Get Your MSDN Subscription ID

All of your benefits come through 5 MSDN accounts. Once you have signed up for BizSpark and been approved you can go to BizSpark.com and log in using the same Microsoft Account you used to register. Then, click the My Bizspark link and you will see a screen like below. You can also get to this screen by following this link: https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/startup.

Once you have logged into this screen take note of the subscription ID highlighted below. You will need this to activate your MSDN benefits. You are doing this for the primary BizSpark user. Later I will show you how to add more users:

Activate Your Azure Subscription

Your BizSpark account comes with five Azure subscriptions each with $150 per month of usage. This usage can be used for any Azure service for DEV, Test or production workloads. Make sure you are familiar with the Azure pricing structure so you know how much you are using but don't worry there is a default cap on your account so that you cannot use more than the $150 in any month. If you do hit this cap your account will be frozen, so then either remove the cap or watch your spend carefully. If you are running production workloads I would strongly recommend removing the cap.

To activate Azure scroll down on the My Bizspark page and click the 'My Account' link under Azure. This will bring you to the MSDN page:

 

 

Now you will be presented with the screen below, click the 'activate your account' link:

 

Enter your details. Use the same email as the Microsoft account you used to access BizSpark and enter the subscription ID you took note of in the first step:

 

 

Accept the terms:

 

 

You will now be redirected to your MSDN page associated with your BizSpark account. This page is where you can access all of your BizSpark benefits, including, software, Visual Studio Online, Azure and Windows developer accounts. You can access this page at any time via your My BizSpark page or via this url: https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/manage/.

Click the 'Activate Microsoft Azure' link:

 

 

Fill out the form that follows, you will need a valid mobile number so we can verify you:

 

 

Bizspark will then start to create your Azure subscription. This will take a few minutes:

Once done you will see a summary of your subscription. On this screen you can access your subscription and bill details (you won't have a bill unless you have removed the cap), but you can see what you are consuming.

Your Azure account is now setup, so go ahead and click the Portal link to access the Azure Management portal:

 

 

Get Started Using Azure

The Azure management portal gives you access to everything within Azure. Click the 'Virtual Machines' link on the left and let's create a VM:

 

 

Select an image. You can choose from a number of different distributions of Windows or Linux.

NOTE FOR SQL SERVER DEPLOYMENT: If you are creating a SQL Server VM, you do not need to choose the SQL Server VM image as this contains a license fee (so will burn more of your usage). Instead, select a Windows VM and install SQL Server from your MSDN benefits.If you click the MSDN checkbox on the following screen you can see MSDN images that have license costs removed, but SQL is not there at the time of this post so use the technique just described.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/subscriptions/manage/

 

 

Select the size of VM you would like. Each size comes with different cores and memory, so choose the most appropriate for your workload.

For a full pricing calculator check out this link:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/

Select the region you would like to place your VM in. If you choose North Europe (Dublin) your data will stay in Dublin.

We take data privacy ultra seriously so check out the trust centre for more information:

 

After completing the wizard your VM will be created within a few seconds and you can access it via SSH or RDP if you create a Windows Server. You can configure firewall rules, setup load balancing, define availabilty sets to maximise uptime as well as define auto scaling rules, more info here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-manage-availability/

 

 

Once your VM is up and running you can view monitoring metrics within the dashboard as well as setup alerts, you can get more info here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/cloud-services-how-to-monitor/

 

Add More MSDN Accounts

As I said earlier you can activate up to five MSDN accounts within BizSpark, which means five separate Azure subscriptions each with $150 per month. To add new users to get these Azure subscriptions go back to your My Bizspark page and click on the 'Manage' link

https://www.microsoft.com/bizspark/startup/default.aspx#/manage

Once here click the Add link and enter the details of the new user. The new user will get an email with a link to BizSpark.com and they will follow the procedure above to activate their subscriptions:

 

What's Next ..

To learn more and take full advantage of your Azure benefits why not check out our Virtual Academy, your source of free online training. Here are a couple of courses that I would recommend:

 

I hope this guide proves useful. Please provide feedback within the comments so I can refine or improve it.

Also, feel free to ask me questions on twitter. @niallermoran #bizspark

Comments

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    It's worth pointing out that while you can create 5 additional accounts, the Bizspark staff won't allow you to create additional accounts as alias's, they need to be real people, so for small startups like my own (1 person) it's not great for creating production / testing / development type environments. I know this because I've just been asked to remove my 'development@' and 'testing@' accounts from my own Bizspark account.

  • Anonymous
    November 21, 2014
    That's a great point Tim. The 5 accounts are meant for 5 different employees.

  • Anonymous
    November 28, 2014
    Hi Niall! I have a BizSpark account and microsoft send me an email telling me the necesity to send an email about the evidence of azure usage, this is only for the primary member or for the other four too? Thank u!

  • Anonymous
    December 15, 2014
    Arturo. I'm not sure to be honest. I would suggest you contact Bizspark support via the email they contacted you on.

  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2015
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 15, 2015
    Hi Hesham, Unfortunately not, it is meant for 5 employees. Thanks for the feedback Niall

  • Anonymous
    February 26, 2015
    Can the Azure credits for each member, be applied to the same Azure subscription (i.e. the startup Azure subscription)?

  • Anonymous
    April 07, 2015
    Hi Nail, We have 4 team members and me. I have one virtual machine under my azure benefits and each of  my team member have their own virtual machine under their own azure benefits.   My question is can we set up a multiple tiers web servers using these 5 different virtual machines in production? Say using my virtual machine as web server and using one of my teammates' virtual machine as db server in production? Thanks a lot.

    • Anonymous
      April 05, 2016
      You can do this in a couple of ways. The VMs can simply be accessed via IP and Port with rules (Network Security Groups) defining access. However, this would mean access would be over the internet. You could create a VPN between the two subscriptions in which case the VMs would appear on the same VNet.
      • Anonymous
        September 24, 2016
        Can we use Vnet peering in this case? I doubt as all these subscriptions will be in deffernt AD.

  • Anonymous
    May 01, 2015
    I'm not clear what is the point to say you may have 750 for up to 5 employees if in reality their benefits can't be combined? If they can't be combined is it possible to apply benefits of some members to the one BIZSPARK azure subscription. For example, one user starts 1 VM another user starts another VM. And each VM is billed against each user benefit?

    • Anonymous
      April 05, 2016
      I understand your point and this feedback is being taken very seriously by the product team. Right now 5 user accounts can create a subscription each and you can deploy up to $150 worth of Azure resources per account. This, in effect, gives $750, worth of usage to the company. You can also create VPN connections between subscriptions should you want connectivity across these subscriptions.
      • Anonymous
        January 02, 2017
        @Niall, any plan in the short term to merge the 5 users credit into one? For my particular working scenario (and I assume for the vast majority) has no sense to have separate credits for people working in the same projects...

  • Anonymous
    May 17, 2015
    Hi, how long do we have this azure subscription ($150/mo)? Is it for three years as well? Thanks

  • Anonymous
    May 22, 2015
    @will this is actually possible using a VPN to connect multiple subscriptions. I did a blog on creating stretched networks. It is a bit old but may help. Be aware a vpn will cost you so will take some of your benefits. Also if this is a production system then you should buy a support option that is appropriate. @andrew your question is answered with precise comments @alex the point is this is what we are giving you which amounts to $750 for 5 employees. Previous comments and this one should answer the rest of your question. @edin. Yes, as things currently stand it is 3 years for BizSpark and 1 year for BizSpark plus Thank you all for your comments

  • Anonymous
    June 14, 2015
    Hi, I am a new baby in field of Azure. A task given to me to find out the total number of MSDN licenses, we need to setup Azure WAP. Can you please help me out ASAP?

  • Anonymous
    June 25, 2015
    Hi, Is it possible to combine the azure account of the five developers under BIZPARK into one single environment, this way we can develop under the same environment and we could be having a $750 credit for the environment instead of $150 for each individual environment.  Is this possible?

  • Anonymous
    August 28, 2015
    The problem is, that my start-up doesn't need 5 VM's, it needs 1 where 3 of us can access it for SharePoint dev / testing. We can't leave it running, because the minimum spec for a SP VM goes over the $150 in a something like 15-20 days. There was a mention of some sort of work-around that I had read previously, but I can't find it? Anyone? It would be awesome if Microsoft could reduce the number of users as an 'option', maybe 3 with $250 each. I think we might scrape through on that. 2 users with $350 would be perfect for me. Any how, while I wait for the planets to align, workarounds anyone?

    • Anonymous
      July 27, 2016
      Same problem here.

  • Anonymous
    October 17, 2015
    Maybe we should bring this to Scott Guthrie's(@scottgu) attention. ScottGu is the Voltron for budding start up developers at Redmond :D. Really it doesn't make sense. The account owner should be able to activate the other free accounts using aliases like tests@, QA@ etc

  • Anonymous
    November 22, 2015
    By signing up for BizSpark, do I get email for my domain (e.g. myname@mydomain)?

  • Anonymous
    November 22, 2015
    I have an existing Azure subscription that I use for development and want to enroll for Bizspark. Can I use my Bizspark benefits for my existing Azure subscription or do I need to create a new Azure account? My Bizspark and Azure accounts will use the same Microsoft account.

  • Anonymous
    January 08, 2016
    Hi Niall: We are MS Partners and sell Azure services. One of customers have BizPark already and he wants to buy from us some Azure services, how can they transfer the credit they have to the future purchase? Thanks in advance

  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2016
    @Hrushikesh No BizSpark doesn't offer Office 365 for free @Maurice you will need to create a new subscription @Sonia cannot transfer free credit to a paid account, sorry

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2016
    Hi, could anyone please tell me one thing, we are using bizspark services of microsoft and i have an active directory with connected of google sso but my google users are shown in here my google apps. but google groups are not shown, could you tell me the reason?

    • Anonymous
      April 05, 2016
      Groups are a premium (paid) feature of Azure AD, not included in BizSpark

  • Anonymous
    March 21, 2016
    I got an invite for bizspark account. I accepted the invite but still I am unable to activate my account, I don't know what is happening. The main account of my friend shows that my account is active. I also got the MSDN ID still I am unable to activate my account. Help

    • Anonymous
      April 05, 2016
      You should contact BizSpark support on support {at} bizspark {dot} com

  • Anonymous
    April 06, 2016
    The comment has been removed

    • Anonymous
      April 11, 2016
      You would have to log a support ticket to transfer any subscription. If what you are trying to do is possible or not I am not sure, but support will be able to tell you.

  • Anonymous
    May 05, 2016
    Niall - Something happened to our bizspark Azure account to where our credits are no longer visible. I think we had signed up for a free trial before knowing about the free credits and it somehow superceeded our bizspark credits. Is there any way to restore this? I have had 5 microsoft tickets out on this and no one seems to be able to help.Thanks

    • Anonymous
      May 08, 2016
      Hi, I'm sorry I cannot offer support as I have no access to you account information. Please contact support@bizspark.com.

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2016
    Hi guy, I really really need help. My Bizspark is showing Visual Studio- Bizspark on top of that o activated the Azure for my Bizspark but it still didn't work, on the Azure manage page it's says I have 150$ and presently 27days left but when I go to the Azure portal it boldly tells me I have no subscription. Desperately need help on this because it's affected my teams productiveness, we have spent a week troubleshooting and waiting for feedback from the MSDN team (responds 24-48hrs), they have not provided any functional solution.. I wouldn't mind the contact detail to anyone in the Azure team who I could contact.thanks for your help in advance

  • Anonymous
    January 04, 2017
    Hello,we are a young startup from Berlin and we joined Bizspark in order to try Azure. We think that service is perfect for our business. But we figured out a problem concerning the accounts. What we need is one business/company account where our developer team can work with. Currently we have a private account and tried to join the developer in order to work together with Azure. I read that we can activate up to 5 developer which have access to Azure. The developer are visible in my admin-account but they can not log in to Azure because they do not have their own access (user name and password). Maybe we made something wrong with the registration?After our testing we would like to use Azure for our business but without to make a complete new set up for the productive system. I hope you understand what I mean. If it´s possible please write back as soon as you can. THX.

  • Anonymous
    January 10, 2017
    Does BizSpark give Office 365 Subscription benefits as well? From the screenshots above, its there but since the portal is updated now, I can see it anymore. Please suggest.

    • Anonymous
      September 01, 2017
      I am not sure. Please checkout bizspark.com to find out

  • Anonymous
    January 23, 2017
    Hi. The BizSpark screen has changed and there is no longer subscription information on it. Please update the article!

  • Anonymous
    April 26, 2017
    How long will be get this 150$ credit under bizspark program ?

  • Anonymous
    July 04, 2017
    Great post. I am experiencing a few oof these issues as well..

  • Anonymous
    October 24, 2017
    Hi Niall,I was trying to revoke/reassign my developers but now the new developers show up with "unknown" status. Is there a email or official BizSpark support that I can reach out to to get this fixed? Appreciate your response.ThanksMaqsood

    • Anonymous
      April 17, 2018
      have you tried support@bizspark.com