Creating a Windows Virtual Machine and Availability Set at the same time using the Azure Portal

In this article, you are creating a new Windows virtual machine and Availability set at the same time using the Azure portal. An Availability sets provide redundancy to your application during downtime, such as during maintenance. We need at least two or more similarly configured virtual machines in an availability set. The primary purpose of an availability set is to provide resiliency to failure of a single virtual machine. This will meet the 99.95% Azure SLA. Virtual machines must be created in the same resource group as the availability set. For example, when you add two virtual machines into an availability set, Azure automatically assigns different fault and update domain to each virtual machine. Fault domain define the group of virtual machines that share a common power source and network switch. Update domains define the group of virtual machines that can share the same hardware host. You have the option of creating a new availability set while deploying a new virtual machine, or creating a new availability set first and then adding virtual machine to it. Perform the following steps:

1. Sign in to the Azure portal at https://portal.azure.com.

2. On the Hub menu, click New, click Compute, and then click Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.

3. On the Windows Server 2016 Datacenter page, under Select a deployment model, select Resource Manager, and then click Create.

4. On the Create virtual machine blade, click Basics. Enter Unique VM Name, VM disk type, User name and Password, Subscription, Azure Resource Group (New or Existing), Azure DataCenter Location (Region) and click OK.

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5. On Choose a size, to see more sizes, click View all and then select an appropriate virtual-machine size for your needs. Defines VM characteristics like CPU, Memory and Disk. Click Select.

6. On the Configuration features Settings, default Storage account is created if you have not, default Network is created, default Subnet mask and IP address is assigned. In the Network security group (firewall) settings, default inbound rule RDP (TCP/3389) is created.

7. Select High availability to Add Availability set. Click Create New, type the name for the Availability set. Then Click OK.
Fault domains – The group of VMs that share a common power source and network switch. By default, the VMs are separated across up to three fault domains and can be changed to between 1 and 3.

Update domains – Update domains indicate groups of virtual machines and underlying physical hardware that can be rebooted at the same time. By default 5 domains are assigned. This can be set to between 1 to 20.

8. Verify Availability set created and click OK.

9. On the Summary blade, click OK. It takes times creating virtual machine… Verify virtual machine is successfully created.

Create a new Virtual Machine and Add to the same Availability Set in the Azure Portal:

For each additional VMs, VMs must be created in the same resource group as the availability set and then select the existing availability set.

1. On the Hub menu, click New, click Compute, and then click Windows Server 2016 Datacenter.

2. On the Windows Server 2016 Datacenter page, under Select a deployment model, select Resource Manager, and then click Create.

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3. On the Create virtual machine blade, click Basics. Enter Unique VM Name, VM disk type, User name and Password, Subscription, Azure Resource Group (New or Existing), Azure DataCenter Location (Region) and click OK.

4. On Choose a size, to see more sizes, click View all and then select an appropriate virtual-machine size for your needs. Defines VM characteristics like CPU, Memory and Disk. Click Select.

5. In the Setting blade, specify the following settings:

    Availability set: KTMAvailabilitySet

Click OK.

Important: VMs must be created in the same resource group as the availability set.

6. In the Summary blade, click OK.

7. Verify virtual machine is successfully created.

8. In the list of services, select Availability sets. On the Availability sets blade, click KTMAVAILABILITYSET. On the KTMAVAILABILITYSET blade, note that the availability set contains the two newly deployed virtual machines. Point each VM has a unique fault domain and update domain.

 

 

Summary:

I hope this article helps in creating a new Virtual Machine and an Availability Set using the Azure Portal.

 

 

 

 

2 comments

  • Great content useful for all the candidates of Windows Azure training who want to kick start these career in Windows Azure training field.

  • Deepak

    Good article

    Once two virtual machines are ready, how do we manage load balancing? How web applications and database synch data between these machines?

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