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Scale and Manage Virtual Machines

Scale and Manage Virtual Machines

31st Oct, 2016

Introduction

 

Virtual Machines can be scaled and managed using scale sets. Scale sets are essentially a way for you to manage a set of Virtual Machines as a single unit. Before scale sets, when you wanted to have a bunch of virtual machines, you would spin them up manually or through some script or something and then you would have to manage them yourself but now, scale sets have made it very easy to manage hundreds of virtual machines at any time. You can also visit Microsoft Azure website to learn more about Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Virtual Machine Scale Sets and How to Create a Windows Virtual Machine Scale Set using Azure PowerShell..

 

Part1: What are Virtual Machine Scale Sets?

 

Virtual Machine Scale Sets are a way to deploy and manage a set of identical Virtual Machines. So with Azure infrastructure service if you want fifty virtual machines you normally have to think about networking, storage, extensions, underlying infrastructure and how you configure these virtual machinesvirtual machine scale sets give you a way to create many virtual machines and then just configure the properties and manage them as a set.

 

Scale sets also integrate with Azure Autoscale – this means you can dynamically grow and shrink the pool of virtual machines. Scale sets also integrate with Azure Load Balancer.

 

Another way to look at scale sets is an Azure Compute resource as part of Azure Resource Manager. Scale sets are scalable computer layer for hyperscale apps what that means is if you have a large scale applications with multiple components that uses Microsoft services and has different areas that you can configure, you can use scale sets to be a generalized computer layer. In a similar way scale sets can be used as an infrastructure for Platform as a Service (PaaS).

 

Part 2: Building a Scale Set

 

1. Go to Azure Quickstart templates GitHub and select any template. This is a great place to find examples of how to use Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

2. Click on Deploy to Azure. This will take you to Azure Portal.

3. You will see Custom Deployment Section. Click on Edit Parameters.
4. Fill out the parameters as per your needs.
5. Click on OK.
6. Create a new Resource group.
7. Type the name for your Resource group.
8. Click on Create.

9. This is the template deployment so within that three separate VMs are going to be made as a set.

10. After deployment you can see that our resource group is listed on the Azure Portal.

Conclusion

 

Scale Sets make it very easy to scale virtual machines, they make it very easy to manage, as well as make changes. Scale sets are very useful when you want a larger compute unit than just a single VM so this will spin upscale sets of the VMs so that they can think about hundreds of VMs at a time instead of thinking about one VM at a time.

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