Dedicated Hosting in Azure

Jim leads the Directions on Microsoft editorial team and has been writing about technology since the early 1990s. Most recently... more

Dedicated hosting, unlike multitenant hosting, allows customers to control the entire physical server and all resources on the server. This control provides physical isolation from other customers, like the type of control available in on-premises datacenters. Three different Azure offerings can provide some or all of the benefits of dedicated hosting in Azure datacenters and provide licensing provisions that favor Microsoft over competitors:

Azure Dedicated Host
Azure VMware Solution
Isolated VMs.

Need for Isolation

Traditional Azure VM hosting (including within Azure Government) uses shared infrastructure, also called multitenant hosting. With multitenant hosting, customer VMs are hosted on physical servers that may also host other customers, sharing compute resources like memory, CPU, and local disk. The VM hypervisor (control layer) provides logical isolation of resources to prevent one customer from accessing another customer’s data on the same server.

However, customers in some regulated or highly secure industries require physical isolation of resources, not available with multitenant hosting, to prevent potential breaches at the hypervisor level. Such breaches could allow an intruder with access to one VM on a multitenant server to access other VMs hosted on the same physical server, even if they belong to another customer.

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