A few days ago I asked my fellow tweeps for some real-world numbers of the cost of using the pretty amazing CMG feature for ConfigMgr. The CMG Platform as a Service (PaaS) is using a A2 V2 instance which will determine the minimum cost, but, obviously, the price will vary depending on usage, downloads, and storage costs etc.
Typically the CMG costs around $100 per month per instance, no matter if you're managing 50 devices or 5000 you will pay that fee. Data is then so cheap ($0.087 at its most expensive) that it doesn't really add much to the total cost for smaller environments.
Note: CMG does support BranchCache, and if you have remote branch offices where clients are using a CMG, you can reduce the download cost quite a bit by leveraging peer to peer.
TL;DR
Using a CMG is in general not very expensive at all.
The Numbers
Below is what I got so far, but if you can, please share your numbers in the comments below, and I'll update the post.
- Org with 300 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 100 USD. Cost per device: 0.33 USD
- Org with 500 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 105 USD. Cost per device: 0.21 USD
- Org with 700 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 100 USD. Cost per device: 0.14 USD
- Org with 2200 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 100 USD. Cost per device: 0.05 USD
- Org with 3500 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 140 USD. Cost per device: 0.04 USD
- Org with 9000 devices using CMG, monthly cost about 350 USD. Used to host 250 GB of applications, hourly policy refresh, and weekly HW/SW inventory. Cost per device: 0.04 USD
- Org with 75000 (75K) devices using CMG, monthly cost about 1600 USD. Details: 600 USD for instances, 100 USD for storage, and 900 USD for about 15 TB of data download. Cost per device: 0.02 USD
- Org with 100000 (100K) devices using CMG, monthly cost about 3050 USD. Details: 500 USD for instances, 50 USD for storage, and 2500 USD for about 40 TB of data download. Cost per device: 0.03 USD
Nice one Johan as always. I have seen the admin console calculator for CMG somewhere but never seen this in production though. Do you remember seeing the same?
Hi. On my CMG I see a very constant (steady in average all over the 24 hours) storage account egress of about 100MB per hour – clients are usually offline at night so I would expect almost no traffic at night – any thoughts to that ?
Hi Don,
Sorry, I do not.
Hi Johan,
What I cannot figure out is how egress gets larger by device in terms of software deployment. For example, if I deploy OS image that's 5GB in size to some laptops, would egress then be 5GB * number of laptops?
I am worried that my Azure bill will skyrocket if I deploy such OS to, say 5000 devices?
If you do OS deployment from the CMG, and your image and drivers are about 5GB total, you can expect a cost of about 40 to 50 cents per deployed PC. So deploying 5000 PCs via CMG will cost your company about $500. If you are doing mass-deployments over Internet, MDT/PSD or OSDCloud will be a cheaper option since they can use the free ESD image directly from Microsoft CDN servers.
/ Johan
Hello Johan,
Thank you for your post.
But I'm still confused, because price mentioned for Azure VM, but VM itself has a OS disk, what type it used (Standard HDD, SSD or Premium SSD), also Microsoft says that CMG use an Azure LRS storage, but what type: Blob, File, Table; Performance Tier: Standard. Premium?
Price in regards of storage just for Egress traffic but not for Azure Storage account itself do I need take into consideration that as well?
Thank you very much in advance!
The Azure VM that is setup for CMG is is created/configured by the service itself, you can't change that. The storage you do have to pay for by that cost is so small in comparison to the computer and download costs so you don't have to think much about it. Storage cost for 200 GB of apps/packages is about $20 per month.
[…] You can also read the blog post from John about some real world cost for using CMG: https://deploymentresearch.com/real-world-costs-for-using-a-cloud-management-gateway-cmg-with-config… […]
do these costs include the cost of the vm (Cloud Service) + egress + storage?
Yes
Around 2200 Clients and 97 usd monthly