Essentials of Azure and AI project performance and security | New training!
Are you ready to elevate your cloud skills and master the essentials of reliability, security, and performance of Azure and AI project? Join us for comprehensive training in Microsoft Azure Virtual Training Day events, where you'll gain the knowledge and tools to adopt the cloud at scale and optimize your cloud spend. Event Highlights: Two-Day Agenda: Dive deep into how-to learning on cloud and AI adoption, financial best practices, workload design, environment management, and more. Expert Guidance: Learn from industry experts and gain insights into designing with optimization in mind with the Azure Well-Architected Framework and the Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure. Hands-On Learning: Participate in interactive sessions and case studies to apply essentials of Azure and AI best practices in real-world scenarios, like reviewing and remediating workloads. FinOps in the Era of AI: Discover how to build a culture of cost efficiency and maximize the business value of the cloud with the FinOps Framework, including principles, phases, domains, and capabilities. Why Attend? Build Reliable and Secure Systems: Understand the shared responsibility between Microsoft and its customers to build resilient and secure systems. Optimize Cloud Spend: Learn best practices for cloud spend optimization and drive market differentiation through savings. Enhance Productivity: Improve productivity, customer experience, and competitive advantage by elevating the resiliency and security of your critical workloads. Don't miss the opportunity to transform your cloud strategy and take your skills to the next level. Register now and join us for an insightful and engaging virtual training experience! Register today! Aka.ms/AzureEssentialsVTD Eager to learn before the next event? Dive into our free self-paced training modules: Cost efficiency of Azure and AI Projects | on Microsoft Learn Resiliency and security of Azure and AI Projects | on Microsoft Learn Overview of essential skilling for Azure and AI workloads | on Microsoft LearnAzure Course Blueprints
Overview The Course Blueprint is a comprehensive visual guide to the Azure ecosystem, integrating all the resources, tools, structures, and connections covered in the course into one inclusive diagram. It enables students to map out and understand the elements they've studied, providing a clear picture of their place within the larger Azure ecosystem. It serves as a 1:1 representation of all the topics officially covered in the instructor-led training. Formats available include PDF, Visio, Excel, and Video. Links: Each icon in the blueprint has a hyperlink to the pertinent document in the learning path on Learn. Layers: You have the capability to filter layers to concentrate on segments of the course by modules. I.E.: Just day 1 of AZ-104, using filters in Visio and selecting modules 1-3 Integration: The Visio Template+ for expert courses like SC-100 and AZ-305 includes an additional layer that enables you to compare SC-100, AZ-500, and SC-300 within the same diagram. Similarly, you can compare any combination of AZ-305, AZ-700, AZ-204, and AZ-104 to identify differences and study gaps. Since SC-300 and AZ-500 are potential prerequisites for the expert certification associated with SC-100, and AZ-204 or AZ-104 for the expert certification associated with AZ-305, this comparison is particularly useful for understanding the extra knowledge or skills required to advance to the next level. Advantages for Students Defined Goals: The blueprint presents learners with a clear vision of what they are expected to master and achieve by the course’s end. Focused Learning: By spotlighting the course content and learning targets, it steers learners’ efforts towards essential areas, leading to more productive learning. Progress Tracking: The blueprint allows learners to track their advancement and assess their command of the course material. Topic List: A comprehensive list of topics for each slide deck is now available in a downloadable .xlsx file. Each entry includes a link to Learn and its dependencies. Download links Associate Level PDF Visio Contents Video Overview Demo Deploy AZ-104 Azure Administrator Associate R: 12/14/2023 U: 10/28/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel Mod 01 Microsoft Trainer Demo Deploy AZ-204 Azure Developer Associate R: 11/05/2024 U: 11/11/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel Microsoft Trainer Demo Deploy AZ-500 Azure Security Engineer Associate R: 01/09/2024 U: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Visio+ Excel Microsoft Trainer Demo Deploy AZ-700 Azure Network Engineer Associate R: 01/25/2024 U: 11/04/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel Microsoft Trainer Demo Deploy SC-300 Identity and Access Administrator Associate R: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Excel Specialty PDF Visio AZ-140 Azure Virtual Desktop Specialty R: 01/03/2024 U: 02/27/2025 Blueprint Visio Excel Expert level PDF Visio AZ-305 Designing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions R: 05/07/2024 U: 02/05/2025 Blueprint Visio+ AZ-104 AZ-204 AZ-700 AZ-140 Excel Microsoft Trainer Demo Deploy SC-100 Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect R: 10/10/2024 Blueprint Visio+ AZ-500 SC-300 Excel Skill based Credentialing PDF AZ-1002 Configure secure access to your workloads using Azure virtual networking R: 05/27/2024 Blueprint Visio Excel AZ-1003 Secure storage for Azure Files and Azure Blob Storage R: 02/07/2024 U: 02/05/2024 Blueprint Excel Benefits for Trainers: Trainers can follow this plan to design a tailored diagram for their course, filled with notes. They can construct this comprehensive diagram during class on a whiteboard and continuously add to it in each session. This evolving visual aid can be shared with students to enhance their grasp of the subject matter. Introduction to Course Blueprint for Trainers [10 minutes + comments] Real life demo AZ-104 Advanced Networking section [3 minutes] Visio stencils Azure icons - Azure Architecture Center | Microsoft Learn AZ-104 Overview of Mod 01 using Azure Course Blueprint __ Practical Scenario Demo with Demo Deploy To enhance your learning experience, we're linking Demo Deploy with Azure Course Blueprints. This tool will allow you to: See Practical Applications: Understand how different portions of the course content are applied in real-world scenarios. Contextual Learning: Visualize where each topic fits within the larger Azure ecosystem and the specific context of the course. This integration ensures a comprehensive and practical approach to learning, making it easier to grasp and apply the concepts covered in the course. Microsoft Trainer Demo Deploy ___ Subscribe if you want to get notified of any update like new releases or updates. My email ilan.nyska@microsoft.com LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/ilan-nyska/ Please consider sharing your anonymous feedback <-- Thank you for your support!Skill your team to increase performance efficiency of Azure and AI projects
The cost and performance benefits of moving your workload to the cloud are clear — reduced latency, improved elasticity, and great agility of resources — but it’s also critical to learn to manage ongoing performance efficiency beyond initial migrating to see optimal results. Best practices in performance efficiency go beyond designing your workloads so you only pay for what you need; it’s building the best of cloud computing into every design choice. Ideally, a workload should meet performance targets without overprovisioning, which makes the resources, skilling and how-to guidance offered by Azure Essentials crucial considerations for any team looking to scale efficiently. Built to provide help at your point of need, the resources available in Azure Essentials have helped clients complete their app migrations 30% faster (an average of 2.7 weeks) from normal, according to a November 2024 research study by IDC. They also experienced 73% fewer unplanned outages, leading to a 94% decrease in associated revenue losses. In this blog, we’ll review how Azure Essentials skilling, tools and frameworks can help your team build resilient, efficient workloads, and introduce self-paced training on Microsoft Learn to help you Elevate reliability, security, and ongoing performance of Azure and AI projects. Maximize Azure efficiency with free tools and expert guidance Achieving basic operational status is challenging enough— scaling introduces additional complexity that can compromise user experience and exasperate latency issues. Teams tap into free training and comprehensive guidance to improve workload performance efficiency by optimizing migration speed, operational effectiveness, and system resiliency. Azure Essentials provides all these resources in one place to accelerate efficiency and monitor workloads to optimize ongoing performance. Tools like Azure Monitor and Azure Advisor that provide continuous monitoring with real-time insights and automated recommendations, while automated testing and remediation using Azure Automation and Azure Functions proactively address performance bottlenecks. These tools collect telemetry data from workloads and their supporting resources to give architectural recommendations and performance metrics that are aligned to the guidance routed in best practices. Learn to apply efficiency principles to achieve and sustain performance Learning to monitor performance efficiency and applying them at each stage of your workload’s lifecycle are equally important. Recognizing this challenge, our Plan on Microsoft Learn titled Elevate reliability, security, and ongoing performance of Azure and AI projects offers curated skilling to help your team improve reliability, security, and performance in your Azure projects, and explore best practices for deploying Azure landing zones and designing optimized workloads. After completing the Plan, you should be able to: Use Azure Well-Architected Framework to build effective solutions that balance performance efficiency, security, reliability, cost optimization, and operational excellence and learn about the model of shared responsibility with your cloud provider. Make effective decisions about how to implement FinOps, use available Microsoft resources and solutions for FinOps, and conduct a FinOps iteration. Utilize Azure savings plans to save your organization money on compute. Purchase and use the right reserved instance for your cloud needs and perform basic reporting on your cloud needs. Maximize workload efficiency with Azure Well-Architected Framework In the skilling modules shared here, developers learn to maximize workload performance efficiency through a comprehensive approach in the Azure Well-Architected Framework. It emphasizes scalability planning and resource optimization, enabling applications to handle increased demands while maintaining cost effectiveness. Rather than treating performance as an afterthought, the framework integrates it into the early design process, allowing developers to build optimization directly into their applications. This approach balances performance with other critical factors like cost, reliability, and security to create well-rounded solutions that meet business needs. The framework views performance efficiency as an ongoing journey, providing tools like Azure Advisor and Well-Architected Review for continuous assessment and improvement. By establishing clear performance targets based on business requirements and promoting regular testing and monitoring, it ensures applications maintain their efficiency as they evolve. This systematic approach helps your team create and maintain high-performing workloads that adapt to changing business demands while optimizing resource usage. Scale your workloads with a design checklist and assessment In addition to the curated lessons in our Plan on Microsoft Learn, we also created an Azure Quickstart guide with additional learning resources to help you build a comprehensive strategy for performance efficiency, including: > Performance efficiency design principles Get crucial insight on establishing realistic performance targets and designing for capacity requirements to ensure sustained performance. This document explores optimization strategies, including dedicated cycles for performance enhancement and the utilization of monitoring tools for trend analysis. You’ll also learn the importance of technology adoption in driving performance improvements and the mitigation of adverse effects from updates, enabling you to construct resilient and high-performing cloud solutions. > Design review checklist for performance efficiency This checklist helps you scale your system to meet growing workload demands while maintaining efficient performance. When designing for performance, consider how cost, complexity, new requirements, technical debt, reporting, and operational work affect your system's efficiency. > Performance efficiency tradeoffs When setting performance targets and designing for efficiency, it’s important to consider how your decisions affect other architectural pillars. Performance optimizations may enhance some aspects while requiring tradeoffs in others. This article lists example tradeoffs you might encounter when designing for performance efficiency, including: Reliability: Optimizing for performance efficiency can compromise reliability by reducing redundancy and increasing complexity. Security: Security controls may be weakened by performance optimizations that reduce security measures, expand the attack surface, or decrease segmentation. Cost optimization: Cost saving measures like avoiding overprovisioning, managing the cost of added components, and ensuring investments align with functional requirements can limit efficiency. Operational excellence: Performance optimizations can reduce observability, increase operational complexity, and create culture stress. Azure Well-Architected Review assessment This Microsoft Assessment helps you examine the performance efficiency of your workloads through the lens of the Azure Well-Architected Review Framework. The self-guided assessment takes about an hour to complete, after which you will receive pragmatic recommendations based on your specific needs. Ensure a positive user experience while optimizing resources Performance efficiency is crucial when developing workloads as it directly impacts user experience and operational costs. You’ll find all of the Azure Essentials resources you need to get started in the Azure Essentials resource kit. Ready to get started? Begin the Plan on Microsoft Learn to Elevate reliability, security, and ongoing performance of Azure and AI projects, and ensure your applications scale effectively while maintaining responsiveness and optimizing resource utilization.
Cross-Region Resiliency for Ecommerce Reference Application
Authors: Radu Dilirici (radudilirici@microsoft.com) Ioan Dragan (ioan.dragan@microsoft.com) Ciprian Amzuloiu (camzuloiu@microsoft.com) Introduction The initial Resilient Ecommerce Reference Application demonstrated the best practices to achieve regional resiliency using Azure’s availability zones. Expanding on this foundation, in the current article we aim to achieve cross-region resiliency, ensuring high availability and disaster recovery capabilities across multiple geographic regions. This article outlines the enhancements made to extend the application into a cross-region resilient architecture. The app is publicly available on GitHub and can be used for educational purposes or as a starting point for developing cross-region resilient applications. Overview of Cross-Region Enhancements The main architectural change needed to extend the application to a cross-region approach was to replicate the existing zonal resilient setup across multiple Azure regions and enable failover mechanisms for seamless operation during regional outages. Below is a visual representation of the new architecture: Component Details Networking Architecture The networking architecture has been extended to support cross-region traffic management. Azure Front Door serves as the global entry point, routing traffic to the primary region. In case of a disaster, the traffic is redirected to the secondary region. Global Virtual Network Peering is used to link together the virtual networks of the two regions. This enables the Redis Caches and SQL Databases to communicate with each other, keeping them in sync and allowing them to perform the switchover procedure. This change allowed us to remove the previous DNS zone groups. Service Endpoints provide secure and direct connectivity with the Azure Virtual Network for the SQL Databases and Key Vault. They allow access to these services without exposing them to the public internet, reducing the attack surface and enhancing security. Storage Architecture Azure SQL Database, Azure Cache for Redis and Azure Container Registry now employ geo-replication to ensure data availability across regions. Azure Key Vault is cross-region resilient by default as it automatically replicates the data to the Azure paired region. Read more about geo-replication for Azure SQL and Azure Cache for Redis. Compute Architecture The Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) clusters are deployed across multiple regions , with each cluster running in a minimum of three Availability Zones. The autoscaling and load distribution mechanisms from the original setup are retained, ensuring optimal performance and high availability. Read more about multi-region AKS clusters. The application supports both Active-Active and Active-Passive states, determined by the AKS configuration. In an Active-Active state, the secondary AKS is always running, providing a faster switchover at the cost of higher expenses. Conversely, in an Active-Passive state, the secondary AKS is deployed but not started, reducing costs but resulting in a slower switchover. Additionally, the secondary AKS can be configured with fewer resources for further cost savings. Failover The failover procedure consists of migrating the compute, storage and networking services to the secondary region. Firstly, the AKS cluster is started in the secondary region. In an Active-Active configuration, this step is skipped as the cluster is already running. Then, the SQL Database and Redis Cache are synced with their replicas and the secondary instances are elevated to the primary role. The traffic is reconfigured through the Front Door profile to hit the services in the new region. Controlled failover is crucial for keeping systems running smoothly during a disaster. When things go wrong, an on-call engineer can start the failover process to quickly move operations to a backup system, minimizing any potential issues. Follow this guide to start experimenting with failover over the reference application.Empowering Disaster Recovery for Azure VMs with Azure Site Recovery and Terraform
Discover how to ensure business continuity and achieve disaster recovery for your Azure Virtual Machines with ease. Learn how to integrate seamlessly with Azure Site Recovery using Terraform, providing a simple, secure, and cost-effective way to replicate VMs across regions. Stay prepared for any outage with a failover process that keeps your apps running, all while paying only for storage and traffic to the secondary region. Don't miss this opportunity to fortify your VM infrastructure and maintain uninterrupted operations!Azure VMware Solution Availability Design Considerations
Azure VMware Solution Design Series Availability Design Considerations Recoverability Design Considerations Performance Design Considerations Security Design Considerations VMware HCX Design with Azure VMware Solution Overview A global enterprise wants to migrate thousands of VMware vSphere virtual machines (VMs) to Microsoft Azure as part of their application modernization strategy. The first step is to exit their on-premises data centers and rapidly relocate their legacy application VMs to the Azure VMware Solution as a staging area for the first phase of their modernization strategy. What should the Azure VMware Solution look like? Azure VMware Solution is a VMware validated first party Azure service from Microsoft that provides private clouds containing VMware vSphere clusters built from dedicated bare-metal Azure infrastructure. It enables customers to leverage their existing investments in VMware skills and tools, allowing them to focus on developing and running their VMware-based workloads on Azure. In this post, I will introduce the typical customer workload availability requirements, describe the Azure VMware Solution architectural components, and describe the availability design considerations for Azure VMware Solution private clouds. In the next section, I will introduce the typical availability requirements of a customer’s workload. Customer Workload Requirements A typical customer has multiple application tiers that have specific Service Level Agreement (SLA) requirements that need to be met. These SLAs are normally named by a tiering system such as Platinum, Gold, Silver, and Bronze or Mission-Critical, Business-Critical, Production, and Test/Dev. Each SLA will have different availability, recoverability, performance, manageability, and security requirements that need to be met. For the availability design quality, customers will normally have an uptime percentage requirement with an availability zone (AZ) or region requirement that defines each SLA level. For example: SLA Name Uptime AZ/Region Gold 99.999% (5.26 min downtime/year) Dual Regions Silver 99.99% (52.6 min downtime/year) Dual AZs Bronze 99.9% (8.76 hrs downtime/year) Single AZ Table 1 – Typical Customer SLA requirements for Availability A typical legacy business-critical application will have the following application architecture: Load Balancer layer: Uses load balancers to distribute traffic across multiple web servers in the web layer to improve application availability. Web layer: Uses web servers to process client requests made via the secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTPS). Receives traffic from the load balancer layer and forwards to the application layer. Application layer: Uses application servers to run software that delivers a business application through a communication protocol. Receives traffic from the web layer and uses the database layer to access stored data. Database layer: Uses a relational database management service (RDMS) cluster to store data and provide database services to the application layer. Depending upon the availability requirements for the service, the application components could be many and spread across multiple sites and regions to meet the customer SLA. Figure 1 – Typical Legacy Business-Critical Application Architecture In the next section, I will introduce the architectural components of the Azure VMware Solution. Architectural Components The diagram below describes the architectural components of the Azure VMware Solution. Figure 2 – Azure VMware Solution Architectural Components Each Azure VMware Solution architectural component has the following function: Azure Subscription: Used to provide controlled access, budget and quota management for the Azure VMware Solution. Azure Region: Physical locations around the world where we group data centers into Availability Zones (AZs) and then group AZs into regions. Azure Resource Group: Container used to place Azure services and resources into logical groups. Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud: Uses VMware software, including vCenter Server, NSX software-defined networking, vSAN software-defined storage, and Azure bare-metal ESXi hosts to provide compute, networking, and storage resources. Azure NetApp Files, Azure Elastic SAN, and Pure Cloud Block Store are also supported. Azure VMware Solution Resource Cluster: Uses VMware software, including vSAN software-defined storage, and Azure bare-metal ESXi hosts to provide compute, networking, and storage resources for customer workloads by scaling out the Azure VMware Solution private cloud. Azure NetApp Files, Azure Elastic SAN, and Pure Cloud Block Store are also supported. VMware HCX: Provides mobility, migration, and network extension services. VMware Site Recovery: Provides Disaster Recovery automation, and storage replication services with VMware vSphere Replication. Third party Disaster Recovery solutions Zerto DR and JetStream DR are also supported. Dedicated Microsoft Enterprise Edge (D-MSEE): Router that provides connectivity between Azure cloud and the Azure VMware Solution private cloud instance. Azure Virtual Network (VNet): Private network used to connect Azure services and resources together. Azure Route Server: Enables network appliances to exchange dynamic route information with Azure networks. Azure Virtual Network Gateway: Cross premises gateway for connecting Azure services and resources to other private networks using IPSec VPN, ExpressRoute, and VNet to VNet. Azure ExpressRoute: Provides high-speed private connections between Azure data centers and on-premises or colocation infrastructure. Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN): Aggregates networking, security, and routing functions together into a single unified Wide Area Network (WAN). In the next section, I will describe the availability design considerations for the Azure VMware Solution. Availability Design Considerations The architectural design process takes the business problem to be solved and the business goals to be achieved and distills these into customer requirements, design constraints and assumptions. Design constraints can be characterized by the following three categories: Laws of the Land – data and application sovereignty, governance, regulatory, compliance, etc. Laws of Physics – data and machine gravity, network latency, etc. Laws of Economics – owning versus renting, total cost of ownership (TCO), return on investment (ROI), capital expenditure, operational expenditure, earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA), etc. Each design consideration will be a trade-off between the availability, recoverability, performance, manageability, and security design qualities. The desired result is to deliver business value with the minimum of risk by working backwards from the customer problem. Design Consideration 1 – Azure Region and AZs: Azure VMware Solution is available in 30 Azure Regions around the world (US Government has 2 additional Azure Regions). Select the relevant Azure Regions and AZs that meet your geographic requirements. These locations will typically be driven by your design constraints. Design Consideration 2 – Deployment topology: Select the Azure VMware Solution topology that best matches the uptime and geographic requirements of your SLAs. For very large deployments, it may make sense to have separate private clouds dedicated to each SLA for cost efficiency. The Azure VMware Solution supports a maximum of 12 clusters per private cloud. Each cluster supports a minimum of 3 hosts and a maximum of 16 hosts per cluster. Each private cloud supports a maximum of 96 hosts. VMware vSphere HA provides protection against ESXi host failures and VMware vSphere DRS provides distributed resource management. VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance is not supported by the Azure VMware Solution. These features are preconfigured as part of the managed service and cannot be changed by the customer. VMware vCenter Server, VMware HCX Manager, VMware SRM and VMware vSphere Replication Manager are individual appliances and are protected by vSphere HA. VMware NSX Manager is a cluster of 3 unified appliances that have a VM-VM anti-affinity placement policy to spread them across the hosts of the cluster. The VMware NSX Edge cluster is a pair of appliances that also use a VM-VM anti-affinity placement policy. Topology 1 – Standard: The Azure VMware Solution standard private cloud is deployed within a single AZ in an Azure Region, which delivers an infrastructure SLA of 99.9%. Figure 3 – Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud Standard Topology Topology 2 – Multi-AZ: Azure VMware Solution private clouds in separate AZs per Azure Region. VMware HCX is used to connect private clouds across AZs. Application clustering is required to provide the multi-AZ availability mechanism. The customer is responsible for ensuring their application clustering solution is within the limits of bandwidth and latency between private clouds. This topology will deliver an SLA of greater than 99.9%, however it will be dependent upon the application clustering solution used by the customer. The Azure VMware Solution does not support AZ selection during provisioning. This is mitigated by having separate Azure Subscriptions with quota in each separate AZ. You can open a ticket with Microsoft to configure a Special Placement Policy to deploy your Azure VMware Solution private cloud to a particular AZ per subscription. Figure 4 – Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud Multi-AZ Topology Topology 3 – Stretched: The Azure VMware Solution stretched clusters private cloud is deployed across dual AZs in an Azure Region, which delivers a 99.99% infrastructure SLA. This also includes a third AZ for the Azure VMware Solution witness site. Stretched clusters support policy-based synchronous replication to deliver a recovery point objective (RPO) of zero. It is possible to use placement policies and storage policies to mix SLA levels within stretched clusters, by pinning lower SLA workloads to a particular AZ, which will experience downtime during an AZ failure. This feature is GA and is currently only available in Australia East, West Europe, UK South and Germany West Central Azure Regions. Figure 5 – Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud with Stretched Clusters Topology Topology 4 – Multi-Region: Azure VMware Solution private clouds across Azure regions. VMware HCX is used to connect private clouds across Azure Regions. Application clustering is required to provide the multi-region availability mechanism. The customer is responsible for ensuring their application clustering solution is within the limits of bandwidth and latency between private clouds. This topology will deliver an SLA of greater than 99.9%, however it will be dependent upon the application clustering solution used by the customer. An additional enhancement could be using Azure VMware Solution stretched clusters in one or both Azure Regions. Figure 6 – Azure VMware Solution Private Cloud Multi-Region Topology Design Decision 3 – Shared Services or Separate Services Model: The management and control plane cluster (Cluster-1) can be shared with customer workload VMs or be a dedicated cluster for management and control, including customer enterprise services, such as Active Directory, DNS, and DHCP. Additional resource clusters can be added to support customer workload demand. This also includes the option of using separate clusters for each customer SLA. Figure 7 – Azure VMware Solution Shared Services Model Figure 8 – Azure VMware Solution Separate Services Model Design Consideration 4 – SKU type: Three SKU types can be selected for provisioning an Azure VMware Solution private cloud. The smaller AV36 SKU can be used to minimize the impact radius of a failed node. The larger AV36P and AV52 SKUs can be used to run more workloads with less nodes which increases the impact radius of a failed node. The AV36 SKU is widely available in most Azure regions and the AV36P and AV52 SKUs are limited to certain Azure regions. Azure VMware Solution does not support mixing different SKU types within a private cloud (AV64 SKU is the exception). You can check Azure VMware Solution SKU availability by Azure Region here. The AV64 SKU is currently only available for mixed SKU deployments in certain regions. Figure 9 – AV64 Mixed SKU Topology Design Consideration 5 – Placement Policies: Placement policies are used to increase the availability of a service by separating the VMs in an application availability layer across ESXi hosts. When an ESXi failure occurs, it would only impact one VM of a multi-part application layer, which would then restart on another ESXi host through vSphere HA. Placement policies support VM-VM and VM-Host affinity and anti-affinity rules. The vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is responsible for migrating VMs to enforce the placement policies. To increase the availability of an application cluster, a placement policy with VM-VM anti-affinity rules for each of the web, application and database service layers can be used. Alternatively, VM-Host affinity rules can be used to segment the web, application, and database components to dedicated groups of hosts. The placement policies for stretched clusters can use VM-Host affinity rules to pin workloads to the preferred and secondary sites, if needed. Figure 10 – Azure VMware Solution Placement Policies – VM-VM Anti-Affinity Figure 11 – Azure VMware Solution Placement Policies – VM-Host Affinity Design Consideration 6 – Storage Policies: Table 2 lists the pre-defined VM Storage Policies available for use with VMware vSAN. The appropriate redundant array of independent disks (RAID) and failures to tolerate (FTT) settings per policy need to be considered to match the customer workload SLAs. Each policy has a trade-off between availability, performance, capacity, and cost that needs to be considered. The storage policies for stretched clusters include a designation for the dual site (synchronous replication), preferred site and secondary site policies that need to be considered. To comply with the Azure VMware Solution SLA, you are responsible for using an FTT=2 storage policy when the cluster has 6 or more nodes in a standard cluster. You must also retain a minimum slack space of 25% for backend vSAN operations. Deployment Type Policy Name RAID Failures to Tolerate (FTT) Site Standard RAID-1 FTT-1 1 1 N/A Standard RAID-1 FTT-2 1 2 N/A Standard RAID-1 FTT-3 1 3 N/A Standard RAID-5 FTT-1 5 1 N/A Standard RAID-6 FTT-2 6 2 N/A Standard VMware Horizon 1 1 N/A Stretched RAID-1 FTT-1 Dual Site 1 1 Site mirroring Stretched RAID-1 FTT-1 Preferred 1 1 Preferred Stretched RAID-1 FTT-1 Secondary 1 1 Secondary Stretched RAID-1 FTT-2 Dual Site 1 2 Site mirroring Stretched RAID-1 FTT-2 Preferred 1 2 Preferred Stretched RAID-1 FTT-2 Secondary 1 2 Secondary Stretched RAID-1 FTT-3 Dual Site 1 3 Site mirroring Stretched RAID-1 FTT-3 Preferred 1 3 Preferred Stretched RAID-1 FTT-3 Secondary 1 3 Secondary Stretched RAID-5 FTT-1 Dual Site 5 1 Site mirroring Stretched RAID-5 FTT-1 Preferred 5 1 Preferred Stretched RAID-5 FTT-1 Secondary 5 1 Secondary Stretched RAID-6 FTT-2 Dual Site 6 2 Site mirroring Stretched RAID-6 FTT-2 Preferred 6 2 Preferred Stretched RAID-6 FTT-2 Secondary 6 2 Secondary Stretched VMware Horizon 1 1 Site mirroring Table 2 – VMware vSAN Storage Policies Design Consideration 7 – Network Connectivity: Azure VMware Solution private clouds can be connected using IPSec VPN and Azure ExpressRoute circuits, including a variety of Azure Virtual Networking topologies such as Hub-Spoke and Azure Virtual WAN with Azure Firewall and third-party Network Virtualization Appliances. Multiple Azure ExpressRoute circuits can be used to provide redundant connectivity. VMware HCX also supports redundant Network Extension appliances to provide high availability for Layer-2 network extensions. For more information, refer to the Azure VMware Solution networking and interconnectivity concepts. The Azure VMware Solution Cloud Adoption Framework also has example network scenarios that can be considered. And, if you are interested in Azure ExpressRoute design: Understanding ExpressRoute private peering to address ExpressRoute resiliency ExpressRoute MSEE hairpin design considerations In the following section, I will describe the next steps that would need to be made to progress this high-level design estimate towards a validated detailed design. Next Steps The Azure VMware Solution sizing estimate should be assessed using Azure Migrate. With large enterprise solutions for strategic and major customers, an Azure VMware Solution Solutions Architect from Azure, VMware, or a VMware Partner should be engaged to ensure the solution is correctly sized to deliver business value with the minimum of risk. This should also include an application dependency assessment to understand the mapping between application groups and identify areas of data gravity, application network traffic flows, and network latency dependencies. Summary In this post, we took a closer look at the typical availability requirements of a customer workload, the architectural building blocks, and the availability design considerations for the Azure VMware Solution. We also discussed the next steps to continue an Azure VMware Solution design. If you are interested in the Azure VMware Solution, please use these resources to learn more about the service: Homepage: Azure VMware Solution Documentation: Azure VMware Solution SLA: SLA for Azure VMware Solution Azure Regions: Azure Products by Region Service Limits: Azure VMware Solution subscription limits and quotas Stretched Clusters: Deploy vSAN stretched clusters SKU types: Introduction Placement policies: Create placement policy Storage policies: Configure storage policy VMware HCX: Configuration & Best Practices GitHub repository: Azure/azure-vmware-solution Well-Architected Framework: Azure VMware Solution workloads Cloud Adoption Framework: Introduction to the Azure VMware Solution adoption scenario Network connectivity scenarios: Enterprise-scale network topology and connectivity for Azure VMware Solution Enterprise Scale Landing Zone: Enterprise-scale for Microsoft Azure VMware Solution Enterprise Scale GitHub repository: Azure/Enterprise-Scale-for-AVS Azure CLI: Azure Command-Line Interface (CLI) Overview PowerShell module: Az.VMware Module Azure Resource Manager: Microsoft.AVS/privateClouds REST API: Azure VMware Solution REST API Terraform provider: azurerm_vmware_private_cloud Terraform Registry Author Bio René van den Bedem is a Principal Technical Program Manager in the Azure VMware Solution product group at Microsoft. His background is in enterprise architecture with extensive experience across all facets of the enterprise, public cloud, and service provider spaces, including digital transformation and the business, enterprise, and technology architecture stacks. René works backwards from the problem to be solved and designs solutions that deliver business value with the minimum of risk. In addition to being the first quadruple VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX), he is also a Dell Technologies Certified Master Enterprise Architect, a Nutanix Platform Expert (NPX), and a VMware vExpert. Link to PPTX Diagrams: azure-vmware-solution/azure-vmware-master-diagramsGetting started with the NetApp Connector for Microsoft M365 Copilot and Azure NetApp Files
Imagine a world where your on-premises and enterprise cloud files seamlessly integrate with Microsoft Copilot unleashing AI on your Azure NetApp Files enterprise data, and making your workday smoother and more efficient. Welcome to the future with the NetApp Connector for Microsoft Copilot!
