A building packed with racked servers that has its own electricity supply, cooling and network links. Microsoft gathers these buildings into Azure regions, and as a customer you pick the region, never which building your resources land in.
Also called datacentre.
Read more: Microsoft Learn
In the Ultra Transcenders books
Each book explains Datacenter in context, with comparison tables and the common traps.
Terms in this definition
- region
A provider-defined grouping in VCF Automation of Supervisors that all share one NSX Local Manager; tenants consume its compute, storage and memory via quotas set per region.
Related terms
- Availability set
Grouping that distributes VMs across as many as 3 fault domains and 20 update domains inside a single datacentre, backed by a 99.95% SLA. It offers neither autoscale nor zone distribution.
- Availability zones
Separate physical datacentre locations inside one region. Placing VMs in at least two of them earns a 99.99% SLA.
- Azure Extended-Network Gateway
The appliance VM placed in Azure for Azure Extended Network. Its OS must be Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition, and it needs two NICs: one on the extended subnet, one on a routable subnet.
- Azure Import/Export service
A legacy method for moving big volumes of storage data offline in either direction by posting your own hard drives to a Microsoft datacentre. Azure Data Box does the same job using Microsoft-supplied devices.
- Billing zone
A group of Azure regions sharing one price for outbound data transfer. Despite the name it is unrelated to availability zones, which are physically separate datacentre groups within a single region.
- Hotpatch
Lets security fixes go on with no reboot, apart from in the quarterly baseline months. Windows Server 2025 Standard and Datacenter can get it via Azure Arc.
- LRS
Locally redundant storage, the lowest-cost redundancy option, keeps three copies of the data inside a single datacentre in the primary region.
- Premium SSD ZRS
Variant of Premium SSD that writes synchronously to three availability zones so the disk survives the loss of a datacentre. Ultra Disk and Premium SSD v2 do not offer it.