Configuring high availability

In many scenarios, you can live with only a single instance of your VM available. This may include low-priority systems, asynchronous processing, or non-production resources. Things are much more difficult when we consider failover and business continuity scenarios. In such cases, you have to ensure that your VMs are properly configured and that even if one of them fails, the rest are still operating. In this section, I will show you how to achieve high availability (HA) for Azure VMs and configure it for resiliency scenarios.

Depending on the settings, you will end up with a machine in either an Availability Set (which you will have to configure on your own by adding additional VMs to it) or a VM provisioned in each available zone in the region.

Note that Availability Zones (AZ) are not available in all the Azure regions. You can find all the available regions at https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/global-infrastructure/regions/.

In Azure, the...