Single-Tenant Compute with Azure Dedicated Host

What Azure Dedicated Host Is

Azure Dedicated Host is an Azure compute service that provides physical servers dedicated to a single customer's organization. Instead of running virtual machines on shared physical infrastructure managed through multi-tenant virtualization, Dedicated Host gives you dedicated hardware capable of hosting one or more Azure virtual machines.

How It Meets the Compliance and Isolation Requirements

• Physical Compute Isolation: It provisions an entire physical server exclusively for your organization, preventing workloads from sharing underlying hardware with other cloud tenants.
• Regulatory Alignment: Many strict industry regulations and compliance frameworks require organizations to maintain single-tenant hardware boundaries, which Dedicated Host satisfies directly.
• Control and Visibility: It gives visibility into and control over the underlying physical host infrastructure, maintenance event schedules, and core allocations.

Key Advantages and Capabilities

• Hardware Isolation: Ensures zero resource contention or risk from neighboring multi-tenant workloads on the physical processor and memory.
• Maintenance Control: Allows administrators to pause or control maintenance windows for host-level updates within defined timeframes.
• Hybrid Benefit Licensing: Maximizes cost savings by applying existing Windows Server and SQL Server software licenses with Software Assurance to the entire physical host.
• Scalable Placement: Enables grouping multiple virtual machines across dedicated hosts while mapping them to specific fault and update domains.

Why This Is Optimal

While Azure offers comprehensive logical separation across standard multitenant services, certain compliance mandates strictly forbid running workloads on shared physical hardware. Azure Dedicated Host provides the precise physical boundary and dedicated resource model characteristic of a private cloud, while retaining the agility and scalability of public cloud infrastructure.