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Manage availability zone volume placement for Azure NetApp Files

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You can deploy new volumes in the logical availability zone of your choice. You can also populate existing volumes with availability zone information. To better understand availability zones, see Using availability zones for high availability.

Requirements and considerations

  • This feature doesn't guarantee free capacity in the availability zone. For example, even if you can deploy a VM in availability zone 3 of the East US region, it doesn’t guarantee free Azure NetApp Files capacity in that zone. If no sufficient capacity is available, volume creation will fail.

  • After a volume is created with an availability zone, the specified availability zone can’t be modified. Volumes can’t be moved between availability zones.

  • NetApp accounts and capacity pools aren't bound by the availability zone. A capacity pool can contain volumes in different availability zones.

  • This feature provides zonal volume placement, with latency within the zonal latency envelopes. It does not provide proximity placement towards compute. As such, it does not provide lowest latency guarantee.

  • Each data center is assigned to a physical zone. Physical zones are mapped to logical zones in your Azure subscription. Azure subscriptions are automatically assigned this mapping at the time a subscription is created. This feature aligns with the generic logical-to-physical availability zone mapping for the subscription.

  • VMs and Azure NetApp Files volumes are to be deployed separately, within the same logical availability zone to create zone alignment between VMs and Azure NetApp Files. The availability zone volume placement feature doesn't create zonal VMs upon volume creation, or vice versa.

Important

Once the volume is set to use the availability zone volume placement feature, the volume has the same level of support as other volumes deployed in the subscription without this feature enabled. For example, if there is an issue with other generally available features on the volume such as snapshots, it will be supported because the problem is not with the availability zone volume placement feature itself.

Create a volume with an availability zone

  1. Select Volumes from your capacity pool. Then select + Add volume to create a volume.

    For details about volume creation, see:

  2. In the Create a Volume page, under the Basic tab, select the Availability Zone pulldown to specify an availability zone where Azure NetApp Files resources are present.

    Important

    Logical availability zones for the subscription without Azure NetApp Files presence are marked (Unavailable) and are greyed out.

    Screenshot that shows the Availability Zone menu.

  3. Follow the UI to create the volume. The Review + Create page shows the selected availability zone you specified.

    Screenshot that shows the Availability Zone review.

  4. Navigate to Properties to confirm your availability zone configuration.

    Screenshot of volume properties interface.

Populate an existing volume with availability zone information

  1. The feature to populate existing volumes with availability zone information is currently in preview. If you're using this feature for the first time, you need to register the feature first.

    1. Register the feature:
     Register-AzProviderFeature -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.NetApp -FeatureName ANFPopulateAvailabilityZone
    1. Check the status of the feature registration:
    
Get-AzProviderFeature -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.NetApp -FeatureName ANFPopulateAvailabilityZone

    Note

    The RegistrationState may be in the Registering state for up to 60 minutes before changing to Registered. Wait until the status is Registered before continuing.

    You can also use Azure CLI commands az feature register and az feature show to register the feature and display the registration status.

  2. Navigate to the volume that you want to populate with availability zone information.

  3. Select Populate availability zone.

  4. The Populate Availability Zone window appears and displays the availability zone in which the Azure NetApp Files volume is deployed.

  5. Click Save if you want to populate this availability zone to the volume, or click Cancel if you want to keep the volume regional.

    Important

    Availability zone information can only be populated as provided. You can't select an availability zone or move the volume to another availability zone by using this feature. If you want to move this volume to another availability zone, consider using cross-zone replication (after populating the volume with the availability zone information).

    Screenshot of the Populate Availability Zone window.

Next steps