Proximity Placement Groups (PPGs) are a significant consideration when planning and administering Azure for SAP workloads, a topic that falls within the scope of the AZ-120 Planning and Administering Azure for SAP Workloads exam. Understanding how to design and configure PPGs is critical for ensuring optimal performance and reducing network latency for applications running on Azure services.
What is a Proximity Placement Group?
A Proximity Placement Group is an Azure feature that helps to decrease network latency between resources by ensuring they are located within the same Azure datacenter. By creating PPGs, you can instruct Azure to deploy Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) resources like Virtual Machines (VMs) and Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) close to each other, effectively improving the network latency between them. This improves the performance of applications that require a low latency network, including SAP systems.
Designing a Proximity Placement Group
When designing a PPG, there are a few considerations to keep in mind.
View of available zones:
To benefit from PPGs, it’s crucial to design your architecture with an understanding of the Availability Zones available within your region. If your VMs span across different Availability Zones, you cannot use a single PPG as PPGs are zonal resources.
Understanding capacity and limits:
PPGs have limits in terms of the number of VMs you can place within them, so it’s important to design your PPGs based on the capacity requirements of your workloads. The standard limit is 100 VMs per PPG, although this can be increased by contacting Azure support team.
Matching hardware types:
PPGs should contain resources that use the same hardware type. This ensures that Azure is able to place the resources together in the same Azure Datacenter within a specified region, providing the lowest possible network latency.
Configuring a Proximity Placement Group
To create a Proximity Placement Group, follow these general steps:
- Create a new PPG: Using either the Azure portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell, you can create a new Proximity Placement Group.
For the Azure portal navigate to “Create a resource” -> “Proximity Placement Group”-> Fill the desired details -> “Create”. - Assign resources to PPG: Following the creation of the PPG, you can start allocating resources to it. This can be done during the creation of the resource (For example, during VM or VMSS creation) or it can be done afterwards by updating the resource configuration.
In PowerShell:
$resourceGroup = “
$ppgName = “
$location = “
New-AzProximityPlacementGroup -Location $location -Name $ppgName -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroup
For Azure CLI:
az ppg create -n
# Using Azure CLI for updating VM’s PPG
az vm update -g
Keep in mind that resources must be in the same Availability Zone as the PPG parents and once assigned to a PPG they can’t be moved to another PPG.
Understanding and leveraging Proximity Placement Groups in Azure can help significantly improve the performance of your Azure SAP workloads. By keeping these factors in mind during both design and configuration stages, you can ensure optimal placement and availability of resources, driving efficiency and performance.
Practice Test
True or False: Proximity placement groups in Azure help to reduce latency between virtual machines.
- True
Answer: True
Explanation: Azure proximity placement groups, or PPGs, physically puts your virtual machines closer together in the same data center to reduce latency.
A single proximity placement group can only be created in one Azure region. Is this statement true or false?
- True
Answer: True
Explanation: Proximity placement groups are defined within a single region. You can’t span it across multiple regions.
How many virtual machines can be accommodated in an Azure proximity placement group?
- A. Unlimited
- B. 100
- C. 1000
- D. 10000
Answer: A. Unlimited
Explanation: Azure Proximity placement groups do not have a limit on the number of virtual machines. It depends on the quotas for the resources which customer must manage.
Is it possible to move an existing virtual machine to a proximity placement group?
- A. True
- B. False
Answer: B. False
Explanation: Currently, you can’t move an existing VM to a proximity placement group. It must be created in the group, to begin with.
True or False: Only Virtual Machines can be added to Proximity Placement Groups.
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: In addition to virtual machines, you can also add other resources like virtual machine scale sets to proximity placement groups.
What is the primary benefit of configuring proximity placement groups in Azure for SAP workloads?
- A. Increased durability
- B. Minimized network latency
- C. Enhanced security
- D. Cost reduction
Answer: B. Minimized network latency
Explanation: Proximity placement groups in Azure ensure that your SAP workloads on different virtual machines are located physically close together, thereby reducing network latency.
Which of the following resources cannot be added to a proximity placement group?
- A. Virtual machines
- B. Virtual Machine Scale Sets
- C. Availability Sets
- D. Load balancers
Answer: D. Load balancers
Explanation: Load balancers, as network resources, aren’t added to proximity placement groups.
True or False: All VMs within a proximity placement group will share the same Azure Availability Zone.
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: Although VMs in a proximity placement group are close together physically, they can span across multiple availability zones within the same region.
True or False: Azure proximity placement groups can be nested.
- False
Answer: False
Explanation: You cannot nest proximity placement groups. This means you cannot have a PPG inside another PPG.
Proximity placement groups can be combined with which of the following for even higher availability?
- A. Availability zones
- B. Azure Dedicated Host
- C. Both A and B
- D. None of the above
Answer: C. Both A and B
Explanation: To enhance availability for your SAP applications, you can use PPGs in conjunction with availability zones or Azure Dedicated Hosts.
Interview Questions
What is a Proximity Placement Group in Azure?
A Proximity Placement Group in Azure is a logical grouping used to make sure that Azure compute resources are physically located close to each other. This helps in lowering network latency between the instances.
What type of workloads can benefit from Proximity Placement Groups?
SAP workloads, which often require low latency and high network throughput, can benefit from Proximity Placement Groups.
How do you create a Proximity Placement Group in Azure?
A Proximity Placement Group can be created in Azure via the Azure portal, PowerShell, or the Azure CLI.
What is the impact of Proximity Placement Groups on high-availability and disaster-recovery configurations?
Proximity Placement Groups prioritise low latency over distributed infrastructure. Therefore, it may affect the high-availability and disaster-recovery configurations as these components would be physically placed closer together, increasing the risk in the event of a physical location failure.
Can existing resources be moved into a Proximity Placement Group?
No, existing resources cannot be moved into a Proximity Placement Group. Resources must be deployed directly into the group.
Can a VM be moved out of a Proximity Placement Group?
While a VM cannot be moved directly out of a Proximity Placement Group, it can be redeployed in a different group.
Can multiple SAP applications share the same Proximity Placement Group?
Yes, multiple SAP applications can share the same Proximity Placement Group if they need to be closely located to reduce latency.
Are there any additional costs for using Proximity Placement Groups?
No, there are no additional costs for using Proximity Placement Groups in Azure.
Can different types of resources, such as VMs and databases, be part of the same Proximity Placement Group?
Yes, different types of resources can be part of the same Proximity Placement Group.
Can a single VM be a part of multiple Proximity Placement Groups?
No, a single VM can only be a part of one Proximity Placement Group.
Can you mix Proximity Placement Groups and Availability Zones?
No, you cannot mix Proximity Placement Groups and Availability Zones. By definition, a Proximity Placement Group is a single, static physical location, while Availability Zones are separate, unique physical locations within a region.
Can Proximity Placement Groups span multiple Azure regions?
No, a Proximity Placement Group is limited to a single Azure region.
How can Proximity Placement Groups benefit SAP HANA workloads?
By using Proximity Placement Groups, SAP HANA workloads can reduce network latency, which is critical for achieving high performance and throughput.
Where do you specify the Proximity Placement Group for an Azure resource?
The Proximity Placement Group can be specified during the creation of an Azure resource, such as a VM, in the ‘Advanced’ settings.
How can you verify if your VMs are part of a Proximity Placement Group?
You can verify if your VMs are part of a Proximity Placement Group by looking at the ‘Proximity Placement Group’ property in the VM settings in the Azure portal.
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