Availability sets for redundancy in Azure - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Availability sets for redundancy

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a simple Azure environment to ensure your virtual machines stay online even if some hardware fails. You will create an availability set to group your VMs so Azure can spread them across different physical servers.

🎯 Goal: Create an Azure availability set with fault domains and update domains configured. Then add virtual machines to this availability set to improve redundancy.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create an availability set named myAvailabilitySet in resource group myResourceGroup

Set the availability set to have exactly 2 fault domains and 3 update domains

Create two virtual machines named vm1 and vm2 in the availability set

Use the Azure CLI syntax for all commands

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Availability sets help keep applications running by spreading virtual machines across different hardware to avoid single points of failure.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and administrators use availability sets to design resilient infrastructure that minimizes downtime.

1

Create the availability set

Use the Azure CLI command to create an availability set named myAvailabilitySet in the resource group myResourceGroup. Set the fault domain count to 2 and the update domain count to 3.

Azure

# Your Azure CLI command to create the availability set

Need a hint?

Use az vm availability-set create with the --platform-fault-domain-count and --platform-update-domain-count options.

2

Create the first virtual machine in the availability set

Use the Azure CLI command to create a virtual machine named vm1 in the resource group myResourceGroup. Assign it to the availability set myAvailabilitySet. Use UbuntuLTS as the image and disable SSH key authentication for simplicity.

Azure

az vm availability-set create --name myAvailabilitySet --resource-group myResourceGroup --platform-fault-domain-count 2 --platform-update-domain-count 3
# Your Azure CLI command to create vm1 in the availability set

Need a hint?

Use az vm create with the --availability-set option to assign the VM to the availability set.

3

Create the second virtual machine in the availability set

Use the Azure CLI command to create a second virtual machine named vm2 in the resource group myResourceGroup. Assign it to the availability set myAvailabilitySet. Use the same image and authentication settings as vm1.

Azure

az vm availability-set create --name myAvailabilitySet --resource-group myResourceGroup --platform-fault-domain-count 2 --platform-update-domain-count 3
az vm create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name vm1 --image UbuntuLTS --availability-set myAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --authentication-type password --admin-password 'Password1234!'
# Your Azure CLI command to create vm2 in the availability set

Need a hint?

Repeat the az vm create command for vm2 with the same availability set and image.

4

Verify the availability set and VM assignments

Use the Azure CLI command to show the details of the availability set myAvailabilitySet in the resource group myResourceGroup. Confirm that it lists the two virtual machines vm1 and vm2 as part of the availability set.

Azure

az vm availability-set create --name myAvailabilitySet --resource-group myResourceGroup --platform-fault-domain-count 2 --platform-update-domain-count 3
az vm create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name vm1 --image UbuntuLTS --availability-set myAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --authentication-type password --admin-password 'Password1234!'
az vm create --resource-group myResourceGroup --name vm2 --image UbuntuLTS --availability-set myAvailabilitySet --admin-username azureuser --authentication-type password --admin-password 'Password1234!'
# Your Azure CLI command to show availability set details

Need a hint?

Use az vm availability-set show to view the availability set details.