Pre-requisite Knowledge
Before we start with the understanding of what Microsoft Azure Dedicated Host is, we should have:
- Basic knowledge of cloud computing and its services
- Basic knowledge of Microsoft Azure
- Basic knowledge of Virtual Machine
Introduction of Microsoft Azure Dedicated Host
In simple words, it is a dedicated physical server to host your Azure virtual machine(s) for Windows and Linux. Meaning, Azure dedicated host provides physical servers to host one or more virtual machines. It is dedicated to your organization and not shared with other customers. BUT the beauty of dedicated host is it allows Linux as well as Windows virtual machines on single-tenant physical servers. Being dedicated servers for our organization, it also helps in mention the organizational compliance and regulatory requirements security, data integrity etc. It is a very new service that allows us to run Windows, Linux virtual machines on dedicated physical servers. Azure dedicated host ONLY runs a workload for one customer; i.e. one Azure tenant. Customer has full control on this physical server along with operating system, it also helps the customer to apply their own corporate compliance, security and regulatory requirements.
Azure dedicated host helps to get the full performance from hardware and software frontsl the reason is it's dedicated to that customer only. Azure dedicated host runs on “pay as you use model” and there is no upfront costs and termination fees. Cool…..
We can use existing Windows license in Azure dedicated host servers to save the cost. Azure dedicated hosts are charged at host level instead of how many virtual machines are running on that host. We can deploy as many Windows Server virtual machines as you like on the host, subject only to the physical capacity of the underlying server.
We can create and deploy Azure Dedicated Host for which we first need to create a host group, then add hosts to this group and this will be used for our Azure virtual machines. We can create an Azure dedicated host and its group (host groups) and allocate to virtual machines during the virtual machine creation. We can use a variety of deployment options to leverage this service such as Azure portal, CLI, power shell commands or ARM templates.
Image Source – Microsoft Docs
- Host group – It represents the collection of dedicated hosts.
- Host – It belongs under the host group and is mapped to the Azure physical server.
Tangible benefits of this service are,
- It helps to address the corporate compliance and regulatory requirements.
- We have more control on the servers to select the CPU, number of cores etc.
- We have the choice to decide the maintenance of the servers like OS patching, hardware/software reboots etc.
- It helps to reduce the cost by using existing on-premise software licenses.
- It has no upfront cost, no termination fees and is a pay as we use model. Users are charged per dedicated host, regardless of how many VMs are deployed.
- It helps to isolate the physical servers rather than shared ones.
- Azure dedicated host pricing
Reference Links
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/dedicated-host/
- https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/services/virtual-machines/dedicated-host/
- https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/dedicated-hosts
Conclusion
In this article, we have learned the overview of Microsoft Azure Dedicated Host.