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In part two of this series on Azure Autoscale, I’m going to show you how to autoscale VMs using Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) and Managed Disks behind a load balancer.
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In part one of this series, I explained how VMSS and Managed Disks make it easier to deploy VMs with Autoscale. If you missed part one, you can read it here. In today’s Ask the Admin, let’s get straight down to business and deploy our first VMSS in Azure.
In this demo, I’m going to use one of Microsoft’s Azure Resource Manager (ARM) quickstart templates: 201-vmss-windows-autoscale. It is possible to deploy a VMSS, with or without Autoscale enabled, via the Azure management portal, but I’d need to manually configure a load balancer. Using a load balancer isn’t compulsory, but it’s the easiest way to present the VMs in the VM Scale Set as a single compute resource on one public IP address.
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The template allows you to choose from Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter, 2012 Datacenter, and 2008 R2 Service Pack 1. The VM size can be specified manually, but by default is Standard_A1. Remember that not all VM sizes support load balancing. The following Autoscale rules for the VM Scale Set are hard coded into the template:
The maximum number of VMs is set to 10, and the minimum and default values are set to 1. The Autoscale settings, or any other parameters in the template, can be changed manually in the JSON code before deployment if necessary, as the Azure management portal includes a built-in JSON editor. In total, the template deploys 5 resources:
To complete the instructions, you’ll need an Azure subscription. If you don’t already have one, you can sign up for a free 30-day trial here. Let’s get started with the deployment.
Using an ARM template to configure a VMSS with Autoscale (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Once Azure has validated the parameters provided, you’ll have to wait a short time while the resources are deployed. Once complete, you’ll be redirected to the pane for the new resource group.
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Resources created by the template (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
VMSS instances (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Note, that if only one VM instance is running in a VMSS, you won’t qualify for the 99.95 percent Azure SLA guarantee. In a production environment, you might want to modify the template autoscale settings to ensure two VM instances are always running in the VMSS.
Autoscale settings (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Load balancer inbound NAT rules (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
In this article, I showed you how to deploy a VMSS with Autoscale enabled behind a load balancer. In the third part of this series, I’ll show you how to use vertical scaling.
More from Russell Smith
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