Tag Archives: Update domain

#Azure : Step-by-step Availability Sets

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In my previous post, I had explained about the high availability configuration for Azure virtual machines, Availability Sets, Fault domains and Update domains. In this blogpost, I’ll cover step-by-step configuration using Azure Portal. Availability Set configuration can be done in two ways, either by creating and configuring it in early stage based on your application architecture or set it up while creating a first VM for each tier and add rest of the same tier VMs to the respective availability set.

I am going to explain, how to create and configure availability set in advance.

Login to the Azure Portal and select “+ Create a resource”.

In the Azure Market Place, search for Availability Set.

From the search results, select “Availability Set”.

In the Availability Set panel, select create.

In the create availability set panel, define the parameters.

Name: Enter the name of the availability set.

Subscription: Select the subscription.

Resource group: Either create a new one or select an existing one based on your requirement.

Location: Select the location.

Fault domains: Select the number of fault domains, by default it is two but for specific Azure regions you can select up to three fault domains.

Update domains: Select the number of update domains, by default it is five but you go up to 20 update domains in each availability sets.

Use managed disks: Select Yes (by default) if you would like to use managed disk for all the VMs that will be create in this availability set otherwise “No”.

Once, you have filled all the details based on your requirement then select “create” to start the deployment of availability sets.

Wait for few seconds, your availability set will be created. Now, you can go head and create your VMs using this availability set.

While creating a virtual machine you get both the options, either select the existing availability set or create a new one.

If you select the “+ Create new” then again you have to fill the same details as filled earlier then select “OK”.

Once you created an availability set, you will not able to modify it and the same concept applies to VM as well. If you have created a VM as part of the availability set then you can’t come out or change the availability set until you delete and recreate it.

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#Azure : Virtual Machines High Availability

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High availability is crucial for any production environment either it is in on-premises datacenter or in cloud. If you will go in detail of high availability, you will observer that HA can be achieved in the following levels from compute perspective:

Hardware level

Hypervisor/VM level

Operating System level

 

In this blogpost, I’ll cover high availability options available in MS Azure. First, make it clear that OS level HA has no difference between on-premises or in cloud. Now, let me provide the overview of H/W, and Hypervisor/VM level HA in on-premises datacenter or private cloud.

Hardware level HA: Dual or Quad processor, dual power supply, multi memory channel, multiple network slots, and multiple PCI card slots etc.

Hypervisor/VM level: All type 1 hypervisors provide high-availability configuration options like operating systems. Once, you configure HA for the hypervisor the VM can be created on top of that and hypervisor HA configuration maintains the availability for guest VMs if any host goes down.

Apart from the H/W and hypervisor level, all the datacenter components can be configured in high available mode such as multiple racks and power supply units etc. but when it comes to public cloud you can’t define the above configurations by your-self. However, cloud service provider does all these configurations for you in advance and to simply the things for you it just provides an availability feature.

Microsoft Azure provides “Availability Set” to provide high-availability at the VM level. This availability set feature takes care of both planned and unplanned failures. To define these planned and unplanned failures, availability set allows you to configure update domain and fault domains.

In simple words, availability set is a logical grouping of two or more virtual machines. When you setup the availability set keep the following principles in your mind:

Setup an availability set for one type of VMs. For example, in 3 tier application architecture create different availability sets for each tier.

For high availability of VMS, create multiple VMs in an availability set.

Attach load balancer with availability sets. It helps you to divide the load among the VMs.

Now, let me explain you update domain and fault domain.

Update domain: An update domain allows VMs to maintain availability during planned maintenance. Each update domain contains set of virtual machines and associated physical hardware that can be updated and rebooted at the same time. It allows Azure to perform incremental or rolling upgrades across a deployment. Once, you create an availability set then you can observe that there are five update domains by default set but you can configure up to twenty update domains.

Fault domain: A fault domain allows VMs to maintain availability during unplanned hardware failures, network outages, power failures and software updates. Fault domain describes the datacenter level components such as network switches and power supply serving a single rack can become a single point of failure for one rack or multiple racks. To avoid these circumstance, VMs in an availability set can have at least two fault domains. Many Azure region only supports two fault domains while other Azure regions can have maximum three fault domains.

If you would like to setup an availability set, follow the step by step availability sets blogpost.