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- Welcome to Azure Essentials.
In the next few minutes, we'll take a closer look
at how you can deploy your own dedicated servers
in the cloud, with Azure Dedicated Hosts.
I'll show you how Azure Dedicated Hosts
gives you the freedom to run your apps
and services just as you would on premises,
but with the added flexibility and operational savings
that come with running your workloads in Azure.
So what is an Azure Dedicated Host?
Well, let's start with the concept of a host or hosting.
Each time you provision Azure VMs in the cloud
they're assigned to a host server
in an Azure data center.
As a multi-tenant service, as other customers spin up VMs,
so long as there's capacity, Azure can assign their VMs
to the same host, and these neighboring VMs
share the same host with you.
Each VM runs isolated from each other via the hypervisor
and operates in their own software defined network.
With an Azure Dedicated Host, on the other hand,
that same host server, in a Microsoft data center,
is dedicated to your organization, and it only hosts
your VM workloads.
To be clear, this isn't a bare metal solution.
Your Azure VMs still run on virtualized hardware
on top of the host hypervisor, and because you're buying up
the capacity of the host, you can fill your dedicated host
with different VM sizes of the same series
until you run out of space.
And you're just paying for the host,
regardless of how many VMs are deployed.
Billing is hourly and you only pay for the host
for as long as you keep it.
So why choose this option?
Well, there may be a number of reasons where
you prefer a single tenant or dedicated host, such as
in the case of regulatory compliance, where your industry
organization, or even customers require hardware isolation
of your workload, or there may be cases, for example
if you're running a performance sensitive financial platform
with low latency requirements.
Host-level isolation can give you more peace
of mind during peak compute times.
In fact, to avoid unplanned disruptions
you've got the added option of deferring maintenance updates
by specifying your preferred schedule
within a 35 day window.
That said, your motivations for shifting
to an Azure Dedicated Host may just come down to preference
where you just want hardware isolation
of your workload from others.
Whatever the reason Azure Dedicated Host
now gives you a path to the cloud
and all the operational efficiencies that you can gain.
And unlike your data center on premises
you can always provision your workloads
on state-of-the-art hardware
which helps you to maximize the efficiency
and price performance of what you can run on your host.
Importantly, you can also achieve this cost effectively
but more on that in a moment.
Having Azure Dedicated Host is almost like
having your very own private cloud in Azure.
So what's it take to set it up?
Well, the good news is Azure Dedicated Hosts work
by using the same VM constructs in Azure.
You can provision them from the Azure portal
or from the command line interface
CLI and even firearm templates,
and the same managing and monitoring capabilities apply.
That said, the first thing you need to do is
create your host group.
In the Azure portal, you'll enter some standard information
along with the region that you want
and an availability zone,
and if you need more than one availability zone
for greater resiliency, you just need to spin up
another host group.
Back in the portal you've also got the option
of all Ultra disk support, which provides sub millisecond
latency and encryption for your most sensitive
and demanding IO intensive workloads.
And you can choose to distribute your host instances
on up to five different fault domains.
Think of these as different server racks.
For example, if you add two fault domains
and two dedicated host instances in your host group
these could be created on two different server racks
in the Azure data center.
You can also opt for automatic host assignment
where Azure will assign VMs
to available hosts in the host group.
And you can also target VMs to run on different hosts
but we'll get to that in a second.
Then by clicking review and create
your host group is ready to go.
From there, you can create individual dedicated hosts
and of course, place those into your host group.
So in the Azure portal once you've selected your host group
you just need to select your preferred dedicated host size
which will scope the VMs that can run
on your host to the associated VM series.
If you want to run different VM family types
for your workloads, you need to create different
hosts that support the VM series you want.
Speaking of which, there are a number
of VM families with various silicon choices supported
by Azure Dedicated Host spanning general purpose VMs,
memory and storage optimized VMs, CPU optimized VMs,
for your compute intensive workloads, and GPU enabled ones
for workloads with remote visualization.
There's also the Azure Confidential computing family
of VMs that provide additional protections
whether you want to run confidential code and data inside
of an application enclave that requires hardware enforced
attestation to access it.
Or you can protect your entire virtual machine
along with any containers with Confidential VMs.
These also offer verifiable remote attestation capabilities
with a third party hardware root of trust.
You can pick from the different hosts available
for your VM series, and if you're unsure
of just how many VMs you can run
on your host for the size and type, you can refer
to the guidance at aka.m/AzureDedicatedHostSKU.
For example, here you can see by size the maximum number
of VMs that you can pack onto a Dadsv5-Type1 host.
Next, once your host group
and host are created, as mentioned,
you can now provision VMs to run on your hosts.
Again, these are still regular VMs
and you can use Azure Resource Manager templates
or Bicep to deploy them.
Let's again look at the experience in the Azure portal.
The process for setting up a VM is similar to setting
up your VMs in Azure, except you'll pick the region
and the availability zone that was set
up in your host group, as well as
the VM series supported by your dedicated host.
Under advanced, you'll select your host group
and here's where you can pick the automatic VM
placement option that we established
by default when setting up the host group.
Or you can manually choose which hosts your VMs run
on by picking the dedicated host
in the host group that you want your VM to run on.
Now, there's one more thing to mention as part
of the VM creation experience, and that's the ability
to provision Virtual Machine Scale Sets
on your dedicated host.
These let you create and manage a group
of virtual machines to run your app
or workload on your dedicated host and provides
sophisticated load balancing management and automation.
They help you to establish a VM template
with the characteristics you need
for your apps and workloads to run reliably.
This includes the VM image with support for Windows
and Linux platform images as well as your own custom images,
the VM size, your networking parameters,
the number of VM instances in the group,
and with virtual machine extensions.
You can also add post-deployment configuration
like monitoring, anti-malware, and automation.
Then beyond consistent configurations
you can also use VM Scale Sets for high availability.
For example, if you've got several hosts
you can automatically distribute multiple VM instances
to data centers in your availability zone in minutes.
Then for auto scale if you have multiple hosts based
on load, you can burst from one host to another
with the same VM series.
In fact, you can watch aka.ms/ScaleSetMechanics
to learn more about them.
And lastly, if you're working with AKS,
you can also build your node pools
with a dedicated host to run your containers.
Next, let's talk about management.
You can check the health of your hosts using Azure Monitor
to set up alerts on your host.
This can be done either from the Azure portal
or by using an Azure Resource Manager template
as part of automated provisioning
so you can get timely notifications.
And as part of your troubleshooting, you can also easily
restart your host whenever you need to.
In addition, you can monitor utilization and the health
of the VMs on your host within Azure Monitor.
Ultimately, because you're paying for the host
you want to make sure that you're maximizing
host utilization
by looking at how many allocatable VMs you have left.
And of course, you can move or delete the associated VMs
and delete an idle host as you need to.
That said, one of the biggest levers you have
for cost effectiveness as you move
to Azure Dedicated Hosts, is the Azure Hybrid Benefit.
When you apply your existing Windows server data licenses
or SQL Server Enterprise edition licenses
with software assurance to all the physical cores available
to you on any given dedicated host server,
you're granted unlimited virtualization rights.
This is a great benefit that can substantially reduce costs.
So here's an example with a Dsv3 Type 4
dedicated host running five windows server VMs,
and the current total price is almost
8,400 US dollars per month.
Now, as I apply the Windows server data center
license, lowering licensing costs to zero
this brings my total to around $4,500
due to the unlimited virtualization rights.
Then in addition to pay as you go pricing,
you can use savings plans to reduce costs further.
In this case though, I'm going to pick reserved instances.
Notice the price goes down to around $2,700
using a one year reservation
and three years takes costs down
to just over $1,700 compared
to the $8,400 price tag that we started with,
which in our case represents an 80% reduction.
And one more thing, if you're just getting started
you can concurrently use your on-premises license servers
along with Azure Dedicated Hosts,
and use the same licenses for up to 180 days.
So that was a quick overview on how Azure Dedicated Host
can help you to deploy your own dedicated servers
in the cloud.
To learn more, check out aka.ms/DedicatedHostMechanics.
You can also watch the rest of our series
at aka.ms/AzureComputeMechanics.
Don't forget to subscribe to us if you haven't already,
and thanks for watching.
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