Microsoft Azure Advanced: Virtual Machine High Availability

Name: Microsoft Azure Advanced: Virtual Machine High Availability
Author: Steven Burnley

Learn about the advanced options for hosting virtual machines in Azure and how these affect your virtual machines' cost and service level agreement

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Hello. In this lesson, I will show you how Azure hosts virtual machines, common scenarios for using virtual machines, how Azure regions are broken up into zones, and how these can affect both the hosting of your virtual machine and the service level agreement that Azure provides. Virtual machines support many third -party applications and can be used exactly the same way that machines in your local data center are used. This means that when virtual machines are provisioned in the Cloud, you can take direct remote control over these computers and install any software that you need for your solution. That makes virtual machines very flexible, but they also require a lot of maintenance. Because virtual machines can be the cornerstone of your infrastructure, it's likely that you will run them in a mission -critical scenario, which means they would be required for your organization to be functional. This requires that you address the concept of high availability. If your virtual machines are going to run for a consistent period of time, there are ways for you to save money on your virtual machines through guaranteed reservations, and this additional savings can then be applied to adopting strategies to make sure that your virtual machines are available even in the event of unintended negative consequences, such as natural disaster or outages within a data center. Azure provides many tools for optimizing your virtual machines in terms of managing the security and the performance of them, as well as helping you understand the budget that it will take in order to support the virtual machine with the performance that you've requested. Azure also provides additional options for both disaster recovery and scalability. Disaster recovery consists of backups for your virtual machines, as well as the potential to replicate virtual machines to other Azure regions. We can also provide additional stability for our virtual machines by adopting different hardware setups for our virtual machines within the data center. This is the concept of scale sets, availability sets, and availability zones. High availability can be accomplished with virtual machine hosting through the adoption of zone replication. Here is a picture of how zones work in an Azure environment. You can see the concept of the Azure region, and this is usually what we select when we deploy a resource. Selecting an Azure region allows you to place resources anywhere in the globe that could be close to the administrators or close to the users that use the resource. However, an Azure region is not a single building or a single data center. An Azure region is made up of one or more zones. These zones then contain the actual physical data centers that host the servers that run your virtual machines. Understanding that a single Azure region is made up of multiple zones is a primary foundational concept for understanding how zone -based replication can help make your application more stable. We remember that physical outages are always possible in a computing environment. Azure provides three ways for you to try to protect your virtual machine in the event of power outages or other types of unrecoverable services. The first one is the concept of availability sets. Availability sets will replicate your virtual machine within a single data center. Availability zones is more expensive, but it will replicate your virtual machine to multiple zones within the single region. Let's take a look at the service level agreement that Azure will guarantee if you choose to build your virtual machines with one of these more expensive hosting options. You can see here the service level agreement for virtual machines. Service level agreement means that Azure guarantees this percentage of uptime for your virtual machines. There is no such thing as a virtual machine that will be guaranteed to be available 100 percent of the time. That's because there's always the potential for outages. Administrators can choose one of these more expensive hosting options for virtual machines if the virtual machine is an important part of your infrastructure that you cannot afford to run without. You can see that a basic virtual machine is only guaranteed uptime of 95 percent of the time. That gives them outages of up to seven minutes per day. That means that Azure can take down your virtual machine or experience outages, and your virtual machine can be down for any seven minutes throughout the day. Administrators and architects attempt to improve the number of nines in the service level agreement, and you can see Azure supports many technologies allowing you to improve your virtual machine. Let's take a look at the concept of the availability set. This guarantees your virtual machine will be available 99 . 95 percent of the time by choosing to replicate your virtual machine to multiple locations within a single datacenter. You can also see that you can increase the availability of your virtual machine to 99 .99 percent of the time if you choose the more expensive availability zone replication option. This will replicate your virtual machines to several zones within a single region, and that improves the ability for Azure to recover your virtual machine if they would have a problem with any of their datacenters or zones. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you how to protect your virtual machines using availability sets and availability zones. Thanks for watching.

Advanced Provider : Steven Burnley 3 Lessons · 22m in Arabic, German, English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Chinese

Course Description

In this course, you will learn about the advanced options for hosting virtual machines. Virtual machines are a popular cloud resource. They may be running critical services and should be protected against outages. Azure provides a technical platform for replicating your virtual machines to give you the necessary redundancy. There are options to request high-performance SSD disks, which would be the minimum protection you would provide. To improve the service level agreement for your virtual machine, you can upgrade this replication to an availability set or availability zone. These result in your virtual machine being replicated to several data centers or several zones within an Azure region, allowing Azure to restore your virtual machine in alternative locations during an outage. There is also an option to create a scale set for virtual machines. Scale sets provide redundancy for your virtual machines and can add them to your set under high-traffic events. The scale set provides both redundancy and performance management.

What You'll Learn

Protect critical virtual machines using Azure's advanced hosting options
View the local hard disk options for virtual machines, including high-performance SSD disks
Explore availability set and availability zone options to improve the service level agreement
Implement scale sets to provide redundancy and improve performance
Understand virtual machine high availability concepts in Azure

Key Takeaways

Azure provides a technical platform for replicating virtual machines to give the necessary redundancy against outages.
High-performance SSD disks are the minimum protection you can provide for a virtual machine.
Availability sets and availability zones replicate a virtual machine across several data centers or zones within an Azure region, allowing Azure to restore it in alternative locations during an outage.
Scale sets provide redundancy for virtual machines and can add them under high-traffic events, delivering both redundancy and performance management.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does this course cover?

The course covers advanced options for hosting virtual machines in Azure, including local hard disk options, availability sets, availability zones, and scale sets, to provide redundancy and protect critical virtual machines against outages.

What topics are included in the lessons?

The lessons cover Virtual Machine High Availability Concepts, Virtual Machine Availability Sets, and Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

How do availability sets and availability zones improve service?

They replicate your virtual machine to several data centers or several zones within an Azure region, allowing Azure to restore your virtual machine in alternative locations during an outage, which improves the service level agreement.

What is the difference between a scale set and an availability set?

An availability set or availability zone replicates a virtual machine across data centers or zones to improve the service level agreement, while a scale set provides redundancy and can add virtual machines under high-traffic events, offering both redundancy and performance management.

What skills does this course relate to?

It relates to Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Virtual Servers, Virtual Machines, Microsoft Azure Certification, Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals, and Microsoft Certified: Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty.