The Mayans' Lost Guide To Azure Dedicated Host

AZURE DEDICATED HOST

This blog post is all about an Azure new service that is a dedicated physical server to host your Azure VMs for Windows and Linux.

To be more specific, while in a regular virtual machine scenario different customers or tenants share the same hosts, with Dedicated Host, capacity isn’t shared with other customers. it enables the deployment and hosting of Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) for Windows Server and Linux on a single-tenant physical server.

Basically, this level of isolation addresses the concern of the customer regarding compliance, security, and data integrity, which could come up when running a resource on a shared physical server.

Use the Azure portal to create an Azure Dedicated Host, host groups (a collection of hosts), and to assign Azure Virtual Machines to hosts during the virtual machine (VM) creation process. (Refer image)

Benefits and scenarios

1. Provide transparency and control over the server infrastructure running your Azure VMs.
2. Being Deployed on an isolated server, it fulfills the compliance requirements as well.
3. It lets you choose Processor brand, capabilities, Number of cores ,Type and size of the Azure VMs you want to deploy.

Pricing benefits:  We can use existing Windows license in Azure dedicated host servers to save the cost. Azure dedicated hosts are charged at host level instead of how many virtual machines are running on that host. We can deploy as many Windows Server virtual machines as you like on the host, subject only to the physical capacity of the underlying server. Azure dedicated host pricing

Before proceeding with the deployments, let’s pause and discuss the charges. Dedicated Hosts are charged at the host level and not on the number of Azure VMs you run on the host. However, software licenses are billed separately from compute resources at a VM level based on usage.

Deployment of VMs to dedicated hosts

To deploy a new Azure Dedicated Host, process includes below key points:

1. Create a Host group : It is a resource that depicts the collection of dedicated hosts,allowing you to build clusters of your own physical servers inside the Azure data center.

2. After you have created your host group, you can start creating new hosts and add them to your host group.

• Select the location (region) of the host
• Select the dedicated host VM family and hardware generation. You will only be able to provision VMs on this host in the same VM family. During the preview, we will support the following host SKU values: DSv3_Type1 and ESv3_Type1.
• Configure the fault domain for the host.
• Enable or disable of automatically replacing the host on a failure.
• Configure cost savings like the Azure Hybrid Benefit.

CREATE VM

• Now you can create a virtual machine on the Azure Dedicated Host. There are a few things to consider about that VM. First, make sure the VM is created in the region you have created the host. Secondly, choose a virtual machine size of the VM family you had configured when you created the host.
• During the creation process, you will find the section Host in the Advanced tab. Here you can select your host group and your host where the VM will be deployed on.

Add an existing VM

You can add an existing VM to a dedicated host, but the VM must first be StopDe allocated. Before you move a VM to a dedicated host, make sure that the VM configuration is supported:

• The VM size must be in the same size family as the dedicated host. For example, if your dedicated host is DSv3, then the VM size could be Standard_D4s_v3, but it could not be a Standard_A4_v2.
• The VM needs to be located in same region as the dedicated host.
• The VM can’t be part of a proximity placement group. Remove the VM from the proximity placement group before moving it to a dedicated host
• If the VM is in an availability zone, it must be the same availability zone as the host group. The availability zone settings for the VM and the host group must match.

LIMITATIONS :  Virtual machine scale sets are not currently supported on dedicated hosts. Also The sizes and hardware types available for dedicated hosts vary by region.

For details refer to Microsoft docs.

For any consulting requirements, please email us on apac@proarch.com