VM Best Practices and Cost Optimisation

Running Azure Virtual Machines effectively requires a combination of architectural best practices, operational discipline, and cost awareness. This lesson brings together the concepts from previous lessons into actionable guidance for production VM deployments.

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Architecture Best Practices

Use Availability Zones for Production

Always deploy production VMs across Availability Zones when available. This provides the highest SLA (99.99%) and protects against data centre-level failures.

Production Architecture
──────────────────────
Zone 1: VM1, VM4
Zone 2: VM2, VM5
Zone 3: VM3, VM6
         ↕
   Standard Load Balancer (zone-redundant)
         ↕
      Internet

Use Managed Disks

Always use Managed Disks rather than unmanaged disks. They are automatically aligned with fault domains in Availability Sets and support snapshots, RBAC, and encryption out of the box.

Choose the Right Disk Type

Workload	Recommended Disk
Production databases	Premium SSD or Ultra Disk
General production workloads	Premium SSD
Dev/test environments	Standard SSD
Backups and archival	Standard HDD

Separate OS and Data Disks