Step 1: Preparing the Azure Deployment

This page explains how to prepare your Azure environment.

Important: To prevent data loss, ensure the infrastructure you use does not automatically delete cluster disks by resizing the server virtual machine scale set. The template sets the auto scale policy to manual specifically for this purpose.

Azure Subscription

The deployment requires access to an Azure subscription and a Resource Group with the RBAC role Owner.

You can check your role assignment by going through the following:

Resource Group → Access Control (IAM) → Check Access → View My Access

Quotas

The deployment provisions a number of Standard_D (general purpose), Standard_E and/or Standard_NC (with GPU) VMs. The Azure subscription has a quota on the number of cores that can be provisioned for the VM family.

Check the subscription quota by going to Usage + quotas in the Azure portal.

Note: Make sure your quota is sufficient for the Automation Suite deployment, otherwise the deployment will fail. Request an increase by clicking the Request Increase.

VM family region availability

Make sure that the VM SKUs are available for the region in which you deploy.

You can check the availability at: Azure Products by Region.

Resilience to zonal failures in a multi-node HA-ready production cluster

By default, the templates deploy the VMs across as many Azure Availability Zones as possible to enable the resilience to zonal failures in a multi-node HA-ready production cluster.

Note:

Not all Azure Regions support Availability Zones. See Azure Geograpies for details.

VM SKUs have additional Availability Zones restrictions that you can check using the CLI cmdlet. See Get-AzComputeResourceSku for details.

The cluster is considered resilient to zonal failures if the servers are spread across three Azure Availability Zones. If the Azure region does not support Availability Zones for the type of VM selected for servers, the deployment will continue without zone resilience.

DNS

The template provisions an Azure Load Balancer with a public IP and a DNS label to access the services.

The DNS label is Microsoft-owned and should have a format similar to: <dnsName>.<regionName>.cloudapp.azure.com.

We also deploy a private DNS zone, for the cluster VMs to be able to resolve several subdomains. This is needed for the installation process. To resolve records in a private DNS zone from the Virtual Network, make sure the DNS server is either set to Azure-provided or 168.63.129.16.

If you want to access the cluster over the internet, you can check out Step 3: Post-deployment steps.

Deploying Into an Existing Virtual Network

The template allows you to deploy the nodes in an existing Virtual Network. However, the Virtual Network must have a subnet that meets the following requirements:

• has enough free address space to accommodate all the nodes and the internal load balancer;
• outbound connectivity configured through a NAT gateway;
• allows HTTPS traffic on port 443.