Best practices to use Azure bulk credit benefit?

[cesaro_cxy]

Hello,

That's not very easy to understand how to properly use the following MPN benefit for the Cloud Platform competency: $12K Azure bulk yearly credit.

I have 2 questions for the present and maybe one for the future.

1-

A user is already associated but I can remove it.

The documentation https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/mpn-benefits-azure-cloud#usage-based-subscriptions-with-two-types-of-microsoft-azure-credit confirms that the Remove option isn't available and says "you need to transfer the bulk credit to someone else during your enrollment year".

Could someone explain the complete process of doing that? If I'm not that user and he's not in my company anymore, how to get back control on the bulk credit?

2-

Microsoft says that this type of credit subscription can’t be combined with offers like EA or CSP.

What is the correct way to use the credit for testing purpose if we cannot add it to our EA or CSP tenants?

3-

In the future solutions partner model on October 2022, the Azure credits seems increased with precision on dev/test vs production. Do we know how will it work? It seems complicated not to be able to credit an EA or a CSP for the production case, isn't it?

Best regards.

[cesaro_cxy]

Thanks.

1- I asked the support to switch the user.

2- OK, so the new standalone tenant associated in the PC seems to be the easiest solution.

3- In the next Microsoft Cloud Partner Program, we can see more Azure credits for dev/test and for production. I hope production credits would be useable on every subscription.

[JanoschUlmer]

@cesaro_cxy 

Usually I would expect that as a company you have control about the user account the benefit was assigned to - so if this was not yet deleted, you could reset the password, log in with this user and then manage the sponsorship subscription. If you already deleted the user account, you will need to contact support - see 

2. Note that the $12K Azure Bulk Credit can be used for production as well, if you just need something for testnig also consider the Azure Subscription benefit included in each Visual Studio Subscription ($150/user/month Azure consumption). The difference is that the Azure subscription benefit in Visual Studio is a Dev/Test subscription type where there are no charges for Windows/SQL licenses in Azure VMs - in the $12k subscription you wold see charges for those. Also, any additional consumption beyond $12k would be charged on a credit card, while the Azure Benefit in VS does not require a credit card and services would simply be stopped when consumption is reached, and restart next month. 

That said, if you can't provision the sponsorship subscription in the tenant where you manage the MPN benefits you have these options:

 - you could also create a new tenant for free, create user in this new tenant and then add this user as guest to the tenant where the MPN benefits are managed. Then assign the benefit to this guest user so this user can activate the subscription there. 

 - Alternatively you can also associate the new standalone tenant with your MPN profile by linking this in Partner Center. Then, you could manage the MPN benefits also from this other tenant, and assign the benefit to users in this tenant

Reg. 3 - I'm not completely sure what you mean, maybe you could elaborate more on the scenario? Generally the Azure sponsorship/bulk credit can not be applied to existing EA or CSP Azure subscriptions, it is a standalone subscription. Also, you can't give end customer access to this subscription, those are only for your own internal usage/test/development, not in a customer tenant.