Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) Processes. 1) Service Request Management Focuses on requests and responses for the IT help-desk items. The processes should be established and uniform. To reduce the workload on agents, organization may consider implementing self service options or chat-bots. 2) Service Catalogs Generally Service Catalogs is a central location/webpage with all the details for contacting the help-desk. It may also contain the self service options and solutions for common problems/issues. 3) Knowledge,Policy and Procedures. This is the knowledge base which controls the collection, maintenance and distribution of information sharing throughout the organization. It shall include the policies, standards, guidelines and the operating procedures for each process or tasks. 4) Incident Management. Defines process on how to handle a situation when an incident happens and how to fix the situation in an accelerated and organized manner. The objective is to reduce t
An availability set is a logical grouping of two or more VMs that helps to keep the application hosted in the Azure cloud, available during planned or unplanned maintenance.
Planned events such as patch security vulnerabilities, improve performance, and add or update features can be considered as a Planned Maintenance. Where as, an unplanned maintenance are events that involves a hardware failure in the data center, or a power outage or a disk failure etc. On such events, cloud providers needs to ensure that their customers are not affected by any of these events. To achieve this in the Azure cloud, one of the method is to use availability sets. VMs that are part of an availability set automatically switch to a working physical server so the VM continues to run. The group of virtual machines that share common hardware are in the same fault domain. A fault domain is essentially a rack of servers. It provides the physical separation of your workload across different power, cooling, and network hardware that support the physical servers in the data center server racks. In the event the hardware that supports a server rack becomes unavailable, only that rack of servers is affected by the outage.
For example, during the monthly patching activity, the VMs are required to reboot. Using Availability Sets, one VM can be rebooted at a time and the other will be up achieving fault tolerance and zero downtime.