I'm in the process of going live in the UK South region, but I'm hitting a wall trying to get any VMs. Even when I request small quota increases, they are just getting rejected. I've searched for Azure documentation about capacity issues but can't find anything. Right now, it seems like my only option is to deploy in a different region, but I'm unsure which other EU regions are facing similar capacity problems, particularly in North Europe and Germany West. What regions do you think might not have these issues?
6 Answers
I've been having all my quota requests for UK South denied for months. If you're looking for alternatives, I've heard that Sweden has capacity and it's also low latency, making it a good option.
Are you on a pay-as-you-go plan or do you have an account through a partner? The age of your account also matters. If you have Microsoft 365 services on the same tenant, it could help. A lot of times, they get hesitant with accounts that just have a credit card and no history since there's potential for fraud. It can be beneficial to ramp your usage slowly, work with a partner, or have other services on the account to lower the perceived risk to Azure.
Could you consider moving to UK West? It doesn't have availability zones, so your SLA will drop a bit, but it typically covers most workloads just fine.
You can check the quotas for other regions directly in your subscription. Just remember that quotas are specific to each VM SKU and there are many to choose from. It’s better to avoid SKUs that are flagged with warnings since those might get denied even if you technically have quota available. Here are some strategies you could try: 1. Opt for different SKUs—many stick to the standard D series, but AMD variants (marked with a lowercase 'a') or the E/M/F-series VMs might be less contested. 2. Request regional deployments instead of zonal ones to access areas where capacity is available. 3. Use quota groups from other subscriptions to help you scale.
North Europe is just as tricky; we've had to stop shutting down machines overnight because they wouldn't boot back up due to capacity shortages. Sometimes resizing or switching to AMD SKUs can help, but it’s frustrating since this isn't the kind of scalability we were promised. We're nearing the end of migrating everything from on-prem to Azure, and management is starting to look at AWS as a backup plan...
Arizona in the US can be a reliable option if you're considering non-EU regions. It's worth checking it out!
That’s interesting! I had a previous client that also pointed to Sweden, and they were quite satisfied with the performance.