[MUSIC]
>> Welcome to this overview of Azure Dedicated Host.
My name is Ziv Rafalovich,
and I'm a PM with Azure Compute.
In this overview, we will walk
you through the Azure Dedicated Host.
We'll talk about the common use cases
and new features found for this service.
Azure Dedicated Host is an offer from
the Azure computing that enables you to run your organization,
Linux, and Windows virtual machines
on a single-tenant physical server.
Note that this is not an experimental solution.
It relies on the same virtualization support
found elsewhere in Azure.
The capacity used for the Azure Dedicated Host is the
same as the one used for virtual machines in Azure tenancy.
It may be that your industry, organization,
or your customer require you to provide compute isolation.
In such cases, you may either use very large VMs
that occupy the entire blade or use Azure Dedicated Host.
With Azure Dedicated Host,
the host itself is isolated and dedicated for your VMs.
You can use multiple,
small virtual machines on a single dedicated host,
satisfying your isolation requirement.
By occupying the entire host,
you achieve additional control.
You can select the host based on the hardware generation,
the vendor, and decide
which VMs are to be co-located on the same hardware.
In addition, you can control the time
of all Azure-initiated maintenance operations,
including those which pause
your virtual machine for just a few seconds.
This is extremely useful if your workload is very
sensitive and a pause of
even a few seconds will impact your application.
Azure Hybrid Benefits enables you to bring
your existing licenses for Windows Server and SQL to Azure.
Applying the Hybrid Benefits to your dedicated host instead
of the VM gives you
additional savings with the unlimited virtualization.
In this case, you are counted for the number
of physical cores available to you on the host,
rather than the virtual CPUs.
Azure Dedicated Host features enable
you to use this isolation solution,
very similar to using virtual machines elsewhere in Azure.
You select the underlying host capabilities,
such as vendor and generation,
and then apply them to your virtual machine families.
Since the release of Azure Dedicated Host, late 2019,
we've added many more VM families
supported with Azure Dedicated Host.
You can use VMs for general purposes,
or memory, CPU and storage optimization.
Even recently, we've added support for
several GPU-enabled families and
an upcoming announcement for Azure Confidential Computing.
You can use the same APIs, CLI, portal,
and PowerShell to create virtual machines on Azure Dedicated Host.
By doing so, the same deployment, management,
and monitoring capabilities and methods will
apply when using Azure Dedicated Host with minimal changes.
We are thrilled to share
some new capabilities found now with Azure Dedicated Host.
You can create a virtual machine and assign it to the host group.
We call this feature automatic placement.
All you need to do is point your virtual machine to the host group
and the platform will find the dedicated host for that VM.
We've increased our scalability
by supporting virtual machines scale sets.
A virtual machines scale set is a single resource in
Azure representing a group of virtual machines.
You can now take
virtual machine scale set and create it within a host group.
In this case, each virtual machine within the scale
set will be assigned to a different dedicated host.
As mentioned, we've increased
the supported virtual machine families from the initial offer.
The full list of virtual families supported on
Azure Dedicated Host is seen below, on the slide.
Let's see how to use Azure Dedicated Host.
You start by creating a host group.
A host group is nothing more than a collection of dedicated hosts.
Note that when creating a host group,
you specify the availability zone to be
used for your dedicated host.
You also specify the number
of fault domains to be used within the group.
In order to use the new capabilities,
you may specify an automatic placement for that host group.
A dedicated host is
a physical server found in the Azure data center.
It is created in the host group and assigned with a fault domain.
Remember that fault domains
are anti-affinity allocation constraint.
This means that two dedicated host
within the same host group assigned to
two different fault domains will be
created on different racks within the Azure data center.
This gives you the physical isolation between those fault domains.
After creating your dedicated host,
you can use them to assign virtual machines.
You can assign a virtual machine
by picking a specific dedicated host.
We call this option explicit assignment".
You can now also assign the virtual machine to the host group
itself and the platform will pick the dedicated host for you.
We call this feature automatic placement.
As mentioned, you can now create
a virtual machines scale set within a host group.
You need to enable automatic placement at the host group level,
and then just point
the virtual machine scale set to that host group.
Keep in mind that you need to match the same availability zones
and fault domain to
the one specified when creating the host group.
You have several options to achieve
high availability with Azure Dedicated Host.
You can decide to use availability zones.
While availability zones give you the isolation from
a physical building, power, cooling, networking,
and so on, it also limits you because
a single host group could be created
in a single availability zone as of today.
You can use multiple fault domains within a single host group
to make sure that your hosts are spread across physical racks.
Keep in mind that specifying fault domain count as one,
is an indication to Azure to try and
spread your host as much as possible, given available capacity.
You can use both fault domains and
availability zones to achieve better granularity
and more isolation options by
specifying up to five fault domains for a single host group.
As mentioned, virtual machines scale sets are
now supported with the Azure Dedicated Host.
In order to do so,
make sure that your host group supports automatic placement.
Then, match the region and
the zone to the one specified at the host group.
Fault domain count should match also,
whether it is one,
two, three, or even five.
At this time, there are several limitations
to using virtual machine scale sets with Azure Dedicated Host.
We do not support zone spanning scale sets as of today.
Virtual machine orchestration within
the virtual machine scale set is not supported as well.
Auto-scaling and over-provisioning should
be turned off when creating your virtual machine scale sets.
Lastly, there are a few families,
those with the GPU and the large memory M and Msv2,
that are currently not supported on
virtual machine scale sets when using Dedicated Hosts.
Let's walk through several topologies for
using virtual machine scale sets with Dedicated Hosts.
Picking a regional scale set with max spread,
meaningful domain count equal one,
will result in Azure placing each of
your hosts elsewhere in the region.
Then, all you need to do is just
assign the scale set to the group.
Specifying fault domain count of two or three
will force you to assign
a fault domain when creating each of your hosts.
Also when creating the Virtual Machine Scale set,
you need to use the same fault domain count.
However, as a result,
each Virtual Machine found within
the Virtual Machine Scale Set will be assigned a fault domain,
and will land on
a dedicated host supporting the same fault domain.
You can also create
a Zonal Host Group and a Zonal Virtual Machine Scale Set.
Use fault domain count of one to spread your dedicated host within
the capacity or specify
fault domain count of up to five if you want finer control.
A dedicated host has skew which is
mapped to the VM family and the hardware generation.
Each family may have
multiple generations currently supported
within the Azure data center.
As a result, you should check for
the available hosts skews in the region,
and zone you wish to use.
For example, if I'm looking to use a Dsv3 Virtual Machine family,
I may pick Dsv3 Type1 Dedicated Host.
In this case, I'll land on an Intel Broad
well based hardware with 64 virtual CPUs.
I can also use the type two,
Dsv3 Type2, and land on a Skylake based server.
In this case, I'll have 72 virtual CPUs for my virtual machines.
You can mix and match
different virtual machine sizes on the same dedicated Host.
In each dedicated Hosts,
there is a limit to
the number of Virtual Machines which could be created.
Use the Azure Portal or any other API to
see the remaining unlockable VMs in your dedicated host.
This screenshot on the right,
represents a newly created Dsv3 Type1 Dedicated Host
with the 64 VCPUs,
all available for my Virtual Machines.
The following demo, we'll walk you
through the entire process of using Dedicated Host.
We will start by creating a host group,
then create multiple hosts,
assign a Virtual Machine to the host group,
and finally, create a Virtual Machine Scale Set.
In the Azure Portal,
locate and open the host group tab and click "Create."
Pick your resource group or create a new one. Pick a region.
Assign a name to your host group.
Decide whether or not you would like to use
availability zones and set the number of fault domains to use.
If you want your host group to be used for automatic VM Placement,
or VM Scale Sets,
make sure to select the automatic placement setting.
Click "Review," then "Create,"
and have your host group ready to go.
Next we'll switch to VS code and see how
to create Dedicated Host using the command line interface.
Specify the host group,
the name for your host,
and then the skew which you want to use.
In this case, we're using the type 1 for Dsv3, VMs.
Dsv3 type 1 host will support all of Dsv3 VMs.
For our next step, we'll switch back to
the Azure Portal and create a Virtual Machine.
Locate the Virtual Machine Blade in
the portal, and click "Create."
We will assign a name for this VM, pick the region,
make sure we're not picking an availability zone because
we did not use one when we created the host group.
The size will be off the Dsv3 family,
which is supported by our Dedicated Hosts.
With that, we'll switch to the advanced tab,
and pick our host group.
We now can decide whether to use the Automatic VM placement.
In this case, the platform will
assign this VM to any hosts in the group.
We can decide not to,
and then pick a dedicated host manually.
We'll review this request and click "Create."
For our next and last step,
we'll switch back to the command line interface and create
a Virtual Machine Scale Set using the same host group.
We'll create a new Virtual Machine Scale Set,
specifying the host group.
Disable over-provisioning,
set fault domain to match the host group.
Pick "VM" skew from the Dsv3 family,
and pick the instance count to use. Let's go with 10.
As we launch this command,
Azure will assign a different dedicated host
for each of my VM Scale Set instances.
After creating the Virtual Machine
and a Virtual Machine Scale-Set,
let's see those reflected within my host group.
I can see that my host group,
has two dedicated hosts.
I can also see that each of
them has different number of lockable VMs.
Picking one of the hosts,
and looking at the VM instances,
I can now see which instances have
landed or assigned by the platform for this dedicated host.
In this case, this host serve my VM,
which is the VM we manually created using the portal
and also picked several instances from my Scale Set.
As you may imagine,
the second host will be used
for the remaining instances of my Scale Set.
This concludes our demo,
where we created a Host Group,
created host and use those dedicated hosts
for VM Automatic placement and VM Scale Sets.
Azure dedicated host, are charged separately,
regardless of how many Virtual Machines are created,
the price is set based on
the Virtual Machine family and the Hardware type.
The larger the host,
the higher the price tag.
Software licenses, such as Windows and SQL are charged separately.
So does storage.
You may use reservation similar
to Virtual Machines when creating Azure Dedicated Host.
Azure offer you either one of three years term
for your reservation.
Note that when using reservation with Azure Dedicated Host,
the reservation itself is
carried between different host generations.
It could well be that during this one of three years term,
you decided to upgrade your deployment and
this newer and larger and more expensive dedicated host.
In this case, your reservation will be carried as long as
you use the same Virtual Machine family with your deployments.
As mentioned, you can use
your Azure Hybrid Benefits for Windows and SQL,
and apply them to the dedicated host.
This ends our short presentation covering Azure Dedicated Host.
Learn more about additional Azure compute offers by
visiting the links below.
Thank you, and good luck.
[MUSIC]