Subhendu's Blog

Greetings to my fantastic students across globe .

Hope you guy’s are doing well . During training most of you asked me about hardware level isolation , at that point of time we don’t had any option to build solutions like this . But now we have that option . Microsoft recently launched “Azure Dedicated Host” .

Azure dedicated host is a service in azure that provide you option to create virtual machine in a dedicated physical server within Microsoft Data center . In a another word Azure dedicated host provide physical server where you can build VM . It also support Availability Zone and Fault domain .

There are two concept that you have to understand over here , one is host group and 2nd one is dedicated host .

Host Group : A host group is a collection of dedicated hosts. You create a host group in a region and an availability zone, and add hosts to it.

Dedicated Host : Physical servers provided my azure within single region .

This is how it look like in portal . But before provision Dedicated host you need to create Host Group .

Size supported by azure dedicated host :

Host Group :

A host group is a resource that represents a collection of dedicated hosts. You create a host group in a region and an availability zone, and add hosts to it.

A host is a resource, mapped to a physical server in an Azure data center. The physical server is allocated when the host is created. A host is created within a host group. A host has a SKU describing which VM sizes can be created. Each host can host multiple VMs, of different sizes, as long as they are from the same size series.

Benefits of Host Group :

Reserving the entire host provides the following benefits:

• Hardware isolation at the physical server level. No other VMs will be placed on your hosts. Dedicated hosts are deployed in the same data centers and share the same network and underlying storage infrastructure as other, non-isolated hosts.
• Control over maintenance events initiated by the Azure platform. While the majority of maintenance events have little to no impact on your virtual machines, there are some sensitive workloads where each second of pause can have an impact. With dedicated hosts, you can opt-in to a maintenance window to reduce the impact to your service.
• With the Azure hybrid benefit, you can bring your own licenses for Windows and SQL to Azure. Using the hybrid benefits provides you with additional benefits.

You will get same set of feature in AWS with term of “Amazon EC2 dedicated instance ” and in google cloud “gcp dedicated server” .