Azure Virtual Machine

What is Azure?

Azure is a cloud service created by Microsoft for building, testing and managing applications and many services through the Microsoft data centers. The Azure hosts web applications over the Internet with the help of these data centers. Azio is very flexible. It gives an option to have the functionality as required. You can pay as you consume, switch to Azure and accommodate the business fluctuations. There’s no need to worry about the infrastructure all the time. Azure is very reliable and has 24/7 tech support.

Azure offers pay as you go pricing and hence it is very cost effective. Staying online all the time ensures customers or users trust. Azure supports backup and disaster recovery tools

Virtual Machine

A virtual Machine is a computer file, typically called an image, which behaves like an actual computer. It runs in a window, giving the user the same experience on a virtual machine as they have on the host operating system itself. Multiple virtual machines can run simultaneously on the same physical computer. Each virtual machine provides its own hardware, like CPUs, memories and other devices.
Azure Virtual Machine offers a high range of flexibility and it maintains the physical hardware that runs on it

Benefits of Azure Virtual Machine

Azure Virtual Machine has a quick and easy way to configure the computer that is required to code and test an application.Azure Virtual Machine is agile and the ability to clone and spin up multiple instances of the same. Virtual Machine allows us to scale services and applications rapidly, efficiently and very cost effectively. Azure virtual machine provides enhanced performance. Demand for applications can fluctuate, so you pay for the Virtual Machines you need and shut down the unnecessary ones to save the cost. Azure Virtual Machines provide extended data center and can be easily connected to an organization’s network.It is easy to set up your redundant infrastructure on Azure and Azure provides a full disaster recovery site at a fraction of the cost.

Azure virtual machine components

Virtual Machine comes under the compute domain of Azure. It also offers various services like Availability, Sets, Snapshots, Disks, Images and many other services like Hosts. Virtual machine can be clubbed with other services like Disks, images, availability, sets, hosts and many more. So the first component and the most important component is the operating System. The operating system creates connections to the remote desktop session host. There are many operating systems available like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Linux, Windows Server, Sent, OS. You can also set the operating disk size so that the memory is not wasted. The next component is disks. Azure Virtual Machines use attached virtual hard disks for storage. They have two types of virtual hard disk. First is an image that is a template for creation of new Azure Virtual Machine. Then we have disks. It is a bootable virtual hard disk. All durable disks are backed up by page blocks in Azure storage. Therefore, the disks inherit the benefits of block storage, high availability, durability and many more.

The disks are mounted as drives on the VM. The next component is virtual network. Many components operate the Virtual Machines in a scalable and secure manner. Virtual Networks could include equipment such as separate network spaces for Internet facing and back end servers, load, Balancers, Firewalls and more. Many of these components are deployed into an Azure Virtual Network. Azure Virtual Network provides many features such as subnet IP address load balancer and network security. Group Another important component of Azure virtual machine is availability sets. If in case there’s a slight chance.

There could be a failure in physical.

Servers, then these come into picture. So, in case of such failure, the Azure Platform will migrate the failed Virtual Machine to a healthy host. To reconstitute the VM, it is highly recommended to deploy at least two instances of the Virtual Machine and Virtual Machines placed on an ability set perform identical set of functionalities.

Azure VM Storage

Disks used by VMs

• Operating system disk: In Azure, every virtual machine will have an operating system disk.
• Temporary disk: Each VM contains a temporary drive. The temporary disk provides short-term storage for applications and processes.
• Data disk: A data disk is a VHD that’s attached to a virtual machine to store application data or other data we need to keep.

Performance tiers

• Standard Storage: It is backed by HDDs and deliver cost-effective storage while still being performant. It is ideal for development and testing, not-critical, and Infrequent access because the max throughput and IOPS per disk is 60MB/s and 500, respectively.
• Premium Storage: It is backed by SSDs, and deliver high-performance, low-latency disk support for VMs running I/O-intensive workloads. The maximum throughput and IOPS per disk are 250MB/s and 7500, respectively.

Types of the disk in Azure

• Unmanaged disks: It is the traditional type of disks that have been used by VMs. We can create our storage account and specify the storage account when you create the disk. The scalability targets of SA (20, 000 IOPS) are not exceeded.
• Managed disks: Managed disks handles the storage account creation/management. We do not have to care about scalability limits the storage account. Microsoft always recommends us to use Azure Managed Disks for new VMs.

Disk encryption

• Storage Service Encryption: Azure Storage Service Encryption provides encryption-at-rest and safeguards our data to meet our organizational security and compliance commitments. It is enabled by default for all Managed Disks, Snapshots, and Images in every region where managed disks are available.
• Azure Disk Encryption: Azure Disk Encryption allows you to encrypt the OS and Data disks used by an IaaS Virtual Machine. For Windows, the drives are encrypted using industry-standard BitLocker encryption technology. For Linux, the disks are encrypted using the DM-Crypt technology.

Virtual Machine Availability

• Availability Set: Availability Set is a logical grouping of VMs within a data center that allows Azure services to understand how our application is built to provide redundancy and availability. An availability set is composed of two additional groupings that protect against hardware failures and allow updates to be applied safely.
• Fault domains- It is a logical group of the underlying hardware that shares a common network switch and power source, similar to a rack within an on-premises datacenter.
• Update Domain: It is a logical group of the underlying hardware that will go under maintenance or be rebooted at the same time.
• Managed Disk fault domains: For VMs using Azure Managed Disks, VMs are aligned with managed disk fault domains when using a managed availability set. This alignment ensures that all the managed disks attached to a VM are within the same managed disk fault domain.
• Availability Zones: It is a physically separate zone within an Azure region. There are three Availability zones per supported within the Azure region. All availability zone has the same amount of power source, network, and cooling, and is separated from the other Availability Zones within the Azure region.

Storage Availability

• Azure Managed Disks
• Locally redundant storage (LRS): We will have three copies of the same data within the same facility. So, if there is a datacenter failure, then there is a high probability that we might lose the data.
• Storage account-based disks
• Locally redundant storage (LRS): It maintains three replicas with the facility.
• Zone redundant storage (ZRS): It maintains three replicas but across facilities.
• Geo-redundant storage (GRS): The replicas will be maintained in a paired region. For example — if our disk is in Central US, a copy will be kept in East US also.
• Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS): The copy will be available for read-only access in a different region.