Introduction

An availability set represents a logical grouping of Azure VMs which controls their physical placement within the same Azure data center. Azure makes sure that the VMs within the same availability set run across multiple physical servers, compute racks, storage units, and network switches. If a hardware or software failure happens, only a subset of your VMs are impacted and your overall solution stays operational. Availability Sets are essential for building reliable cloud solutions. With availability sets, Azure offers 99.95% VM uptime SLA.

Availability zones represent unique physical locations within a single Azure region. Each zone is made up of one or more data centers equipped with independent power, cooling, and networking. The physical separation of availability zones within a region protects applications and data from datacenter failures. Zone-redundant services replicate your applications and data across availability zones to protect from single points of failure. With availability zones, Azure offers 99.99% VM uptime SLA.

Azure virtual machine scale sets let you create and manage a group of identical, load-balanced VMs. The number of VM instances can automatically increase or decrease in response to demand or a defined schedule. Scale sets provide high availability to your applications, and allow you to centrally manage, configure, and update many VMs. With virtual machine scale sets, you can build large-scale services for areas such as compute, big data, and container workloads.

In this lab, you will understand the highly available Azure VMs.

• residing in the same availability set behind a Basic Azure Load Balancer

• residing in different availability zones behind a Standard Azure Load Balancer 

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

• Deploy highly available Azure VMs into an availability set behind a Basic Azure Load Balancer by using Azure Resource Manager templates
• Analyze highly available Azure VMs deployed into an availability set behind a Basic Azure Load Balancer

Intended Audience

• Candidates for Azure Administrator Certification
• Cloud Engineers