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Manage availability zone volume placement for Azure NetApp Files

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Azure NetApp Files lets you deploy new volumes in the logical availability zone of your choice. To better understand availability zones, refer to Using availability zones for high availability.

Requirements and considerations

  • The availability zone volume placement feature is supported only on newly created volumes. It is not currently supported on existing volumes.

  • This feature does not 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 are not 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 does not create zonal VMs upon volume creation, or vice versa.

Important

Once the volume is created using 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.

Register the feature

The feature of availability zone volume placement is currently in preview. If you are using this feature for the first time, you need to register the feature first.

  1. Register the feature:

    Register-AzProviderFeature -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.NetApp -FeatureName ANFAvailabilityZone

  2. Check the status of the feature registration:

    Get-AzProviderFeature -ProviderNamespace Microsoft.NetApp -FeatureName ANFAvailabilityZone

    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.

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.

Next steps