Azure Public Preview Lets You Share Capacity Reservation Groups Across Subscriptions

Microsoft has rolled out a Public Preview that allows Azure users to share Capacity Reservation Groups (CRGs) across subscriptions. It’s a long-awaited feature designed to simplify resource management and cut infrastructure costs.

Previously, organizations could only deploy virtual machines within a Capacity Reservation Group tied to a single subscription. Now, admins can share reserved compute capacity with other subscriptions, unlocking new possibilities for resource reuse, centralized capacity control, and improved scalability.

How does the new sharing model work?

Under the new setup, you’ll need at least two subscriptions:

• A provider subscription that creates and hosts the Capacity Reservation Group.
• A consumer subscription that gets access to deploy VMs using that reserved capacity.

For example, a company can now repurpose a Disaster Recovery CRG for development and testing workloads across non-production environments. To remind you, it’s something that wasn’t possible before.

Going forward, each CRG can be shared with up to 100 consumer subscriptions, giving enterprises massive flexibility in how they allocate resources. However, Microsoft notes that portal support isn’t available yet. That means users must rely on APIs or Azure clients. Additionally, VM Scale Sets can’t be re-provisioned during a zone outage when using shared CRGs.

Why does it matter for Azure customers?

This update could be a game-changer for large organizations juggling multiple subscriptions. The ability to share capacity reservations helps reduce over-provisioning and aligns with the growing demand for cross-team collaboration in cloud resource planning.

By combining CRG sharing with Azure Reserved VM Instances (RIs), customers can now achieve both cost savings and capacity assurance. And, it is quite important for business-critical workloads that require guaranteed compute availability.

Microsoft further notes that related documentation and API samples for the new feature are available on the official Azure portal