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Difficulty: HardDesign Compute High Availability

An organization is migrating a legacy SQL Server failover cluster instance (FCI) to Azure Virtual Machines. The workload requires a compute uptime SLA of 99.99%99.99\% and must remain operational even in the event of an entire datacenter outage within the region. The database nodes require access to a shared block storage volume for the cluster resources. Which of the following compute and storage deployment strategies should you recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. Deploy the cluster virtual machines in different Availability Zones within the same Azure region, and attach a zone-redundant storage (ZRS) Premium SSD shared disk to both virtual machines.Answer
  2. B
    Deploy the cluster virtual machines in an Availability Set within a single Azure region, and attach a locally redundant storage (LRS) Premium SSD shared disk to both virtual machines.
  3. C
    Deploy the cluster virtual machines in different Availability Zones within the same Azure region, and attach a locally redundant storage (LRS) Premium SSD shared disk to both virtual machines.
  4. D
    Deploy the cluster virtual machines in a single proximity placement group within a single Availability Zone, and attach a locally redundant storage (LRS) Premium SSD shared disk to both virtual machines.

Answer

Deploying the cluster virtual machines in different Availability Zones within the same Azure region, and attaching a zone-redundant storage (ZRS) Premium SSD shared disk to both virtual machines.
To achieve a 99.99%99.99\% virtual machine connectivity SLA and survive a datacenter outage, virtual machines must be deployed across two or more Availability Zones in the same region. Because the legacy cluster requires shared block storage, a zone-redundant storage (ZRS) Premium SSD shared disk must be used so that the shared volume can be attached to virtual machines residing in different zones.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the compute high availability requirement.
A 99.99%99.99\% VM uptime SLA requires deploying VMs across multiple Availability Zones in the same region.
Single-zone deployments like Availability Sets only provide up to a 99.95%99.95\% SLA.
2
Evaluate the shared storage requirement for the failover cluster.
The shared block storage volume must be accessible by VMs located in different Availability Zones.
Locally redundant storage (LRS) shared disks are restricted to a single zone, whereas zone-redundant storage (ZRS) shared disks can span multiple zones in a region.
3
Combine compute and storage configurations to form the final architecture.
Cross-zone VM placement paired with a ZRS Premium SSD shared disk meets both the 99.99%99.99\% SLA and shared-disk requirements.
This is the only configuration that provides zone-redundant compute and storage, fulfilling the high availability and cluster requirements.

Key Concept

Designing zone-redundant compute architectures with shared storage for high availability.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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Topics

Design Compute High Availability

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