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Virtual Machines

General Information​

Limitations:

  • 20 VMs per region per subscription. Support ticket can increase limits.

Disk types:

  • managed disks: managed by Azure. Up to 4TB.
  • unmanaged disks: user is responsible for the storage accounts. Single account supports up to 20,000 input/output operations per second (~ 40 standards VHDs at full utilisation).

Get VM image list with the following command:

az vm image list

Virtual Machine Extensions​

  • Custom Script Extension - run custom scripts when the VM is provisioned.
  • PowerShell Desired State Configuration Extension - sets up PowerShell DSC.
  • Azure Diagnostics Extension - configures VM to collect diagnostics data.

Azure supports cloud-init for Linux VMs that support it. Works with all major automation tooling like:

  • Ansible
  • Chef
  • SaltStack
  • Puppet

Availability Zones​

Availability zone is a physically separate zone, within an Azure region. There are three Availability Zones per Azure region.

There are two categories of services that support Availability Zones:

  • Zonal services - a resource pinned to a specific zone, or
  • Zone-redundant services - replicates automatically across zones.

Availability Sets​

Allows Azure to understand how to build application for redundancy and availability. Composed of:

  • fault domain (FDs) - logical group of hardware that shares common power source and network switch (similar to a rack within a datacentre).
  • upgrade domain (UDs) - logical group of hardware that can undergo maintenance (only one upgrade domain at a time in no particular order).

Scale Sets​

Allows creation of a group of load balanced VMs that are scaled automatically.

Load Balancer​

Uses Layer-4 (TCP, UDP) load balancing. Health probe monitors each VM on a given port. VMs are connected to a load balancer with their network interface card (NIC).

Load balancer rules for specific ports and protocols are defined to control the flow of traffic to VMs.

VM Sizes​

  • General purpose (A-series, B-series, D-series)
  • Compute optimised (F-series)
  • Memory optimised (E-series, D-series, G-series, M-series)
  • Storage optimised (L-series)
  • GPU (N-series)
  • High performance compute (H-series)

Upload Windows Image to Azure​

Azure supports both generation 1 and generation 2 VMs that are in VHD file format and that have a fixed-size disk. The maximum size allowed for the IS VHD on a generation 1 VM is 2 TB.

VHDX file can be converted to VHD, dynamically expanding disk to a fixed-size disk, but VM generation cannot be changed.

Az CLI​

Create a new resource group:

az group create --name az204-vm-rg --location uksouth

Create a Linux VM:

az vm create `
    --resource-group az204-vm-rg `
    --name az204vm `
    --image UbuntuLTS `
    --generate-ssh-keys `
    --admin-username pavels

Open port 80:

az vm open-port --resource-group az204-vm-rg --name az204vm --port 80

Remove created resource group:

az group delete --name az204-vm-rg --yes