Introduction:
Introduction:
The Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are the most basic Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) product of the Microsoft Azure platform. They offer scalable on-demand computing power that simulates physical servers, yet with no hardware maintenance cost. In the 2026 technology scenario, the concept of Azure VMs has been refined into highly purposeful units, using the infrastructure of planetary scale and highly-specific silicon to drive everything at the entry-level development platform, up to the largest AI training cluster, and mission-critical enterprise database.
Azure Architecture of Virtualisation:
Azure Architecture of Virtualisation:
Azure VM is a complicated composition of compute, storage, and networking layers that are coordinated by the Azure Fabric Controller, the brain of the data centre. All VMs operate on a hypervisor, which divides the physical hardware and offers isolated operating environments of Windows or Linux operating systems. In order to achieve good performance, Azure uses Azure Boost, which is a system that takes off the virtualisation capabilities and leverages its own dedicated hardware. This lowers the number of processors used by the guest OS by a significant margin and also gives sub-millisecond latency to workloads that are data-heavy. To further know about it, one can visit Azure Training.
- Fabric Controller: The fabric controller maintains the life cycle of VMs and resources and the health of the resources. As well as automatically migrating the workloads in case of hardware failure.
- Virtual Network (VNet): This feature is the logical isolation of a network assigned to VMs with the opportunity of custom IP addressing, subnets, and security policies.
- Network Interface (NIC): Allows the VM and the VNet to communicate; Accelerated Networking transfers this traffic to hardware at a faster rate.
- Managed Disks: Disk drive storage volumes, available as Standard, Premium SSD v2, or Ultra Disk, and they do not depend on the lifecycle of the VM.
- Temporary Disk: Non-persistent local SSD available to page files and as very fast swap space, but lacks any data persistence between reboots.
- Azure Compute Gallery: Composite repository for managing and sharing custom VM images across regions and subscriptions.
Families and Specializations of Compute: VM Families and Specializations
Families and Specializations of Compute: VM Families and Specializations
Azure categorises its VM services into special families so that users can match their compute resources to the particular workload needs. This is essential in performance optimisation and cost management as a result of this so-called right-sizing. Regretting the need to have a high CPU-to-memory ratio to process large quantities of data with batch processing or the need to use a large amount of GPU to create generative artificial intelligence, every SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) has a dedicated SKU.
- General Purpose (B, D-Series): Mid to low ratios of CPU to memory; suitable for web server, development environment and small to medium databases.
- Compute Optimised (F-Series): Large CPU/memory ratio; used in high-performance web servers, network appliances and batch processing.
- Memory Optimised (E, M-series): Large memory-to-CPU; needed by relational databases, in-memory analytics (such as SAP HANA), and huge caches.
- Storage Optimised (L-Series): High disk throughput and IOPS; applies to Big Data, NoSQL databases (Cassandra, MongoDB), and data warehousing.
- GPU Optimised (N-Series): NVIDIA and AMD GPUs; applicable to the training of AI models, video rendering and high-end visualisation.
- High Performance (H-Series): Custom-purpose high performance, based on InfiniBand connectivity and fluid dynamics and weather workloads.
Ensuring Resilience: Availability and Scalability Options
Ensuring Resilience: Availability and Scalability Options
In a cloud setup, there is a statistical guarantee of hardware failure. Azure offers a progressive availability strategy to make sure that the applications can be available even when maintenance is scheduled and also when it is not. Organisations are able to attain maximum uptimes of 99.99% by the use of Availability Zones and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS). Scale sets make it possible to have "Horizontal Scaling" of the system. VM instances are automatically added or removed depending on real-time demand indicators such as CPU utilisation or network traffic. Gaining the Microsoft Azure Certification can help you start a promising career in this domain.
- Availability Sets: Logical groupings that provide defence against hardware failure in a single data centre by distributing VMs across multiple racks.
- Availability Zones: Data centres in an Azure region are meant to be physically separated, which offers defence against facility-level failures such as power or cooling outages.
- Virtual Machine Scale Set: Scale out and Scale in scale out and scale in with thousands of identical VMs.
- Update Domains: VMs that can be restarted together in the same period when performing platform maintenance. So that during maintenance, there is always a part of the application online.
- Azure Site Recovery: It is a disaster recovery tool that benefits a backup system by copying the VMs to a second geo location that is highly resilient.
- Proximity Placement Groups: This logical grouping, which is also known as proximity placement, is applied to reduce the network latency by placing VMs as near to each other as possible.
Conclusion:
Conclusion:
Azure Virtual Machines continue to be at the core of the contemporary hybrid cloud as they offer the capability to execute antiquated applications in addition to up-to-date AI workloads. With the knowledge of the architecture behind it, including the special silicon of Azure Boost, as well as the high-availability architecture of Availability Zones, engineers are able to design systems that are cost-effective and incredibly resilient. Credentials like the AZ 104 Certification can help you start a promising career in this domain. With the platform further adopting agentic AI to do automated management and performance tuning, organisations are seeing the difficulty of managing this type of virtualised asset diminish and therefore, can concentrate on innovation and not infrastructure.
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