A company plans to deploy a high-performance backend application on five Azure Virtual Machines in the East US region. Each virtual machine has a dedicated public IP address utilizing the Basic SKU for direct management. You need to design a load balancing solution to distribute inbound TCP traffic across these virtual machines using a regional load balancer. The design must support availability zones and provide a 99.99% SLA. Which load balancing configuration should you recommend?
- Deploy an Azure Standard Load Balancer, and upgrade the public IP addresses of the virtual machines to the Standard SKU.Answer
- BDeploy an Azure Standard Load Balancer, and retain the existing Basic SKU public IP addresses on the virtual machines.
- CDeploy an Azure Basic Load Balancer, and associate the existing Basic SKU public IP addresses.
- DDeploy an Azure Traffic Manager profile, and configure it to route TCP traffic directly to the virtual machines' existing public IP addresses.
Answer
Deploy an Azure Standard Load Balancer, and upgrade the public IP addresses of the virtual machines to the Standard SKU.
Deploying an Azure Standard Load Balancer and upgrading the virtual machine public IPs to the Standard SKU is the correct design. The Standard Load Balancer is required to meet the 99.99% SLA and support availability zones. Azure requires that any public IP address assigned to a virtual machine network interface (NIC) in the backend pool of a Standard Load Balancer must match the load balancer's SKU (Standard SKU). Therefore, upgrading the virtual machines' public IPs to the Standard SKU satisfies both compatibility and service-level requirements.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Load Balancer SKU compatibility and backend pool IP SKU matching constraints