Azure virtual machine scale sets allow for the creation and management of an identical group of load balanced VMs that can automatically scale up or down on a schedule or in response to demand like CPU, memory demand, or network traffic. These provide high availability to IaaS applications by typically distributing across multiple instances as well as providing a central way to manage, configure and update a large number of VMs.
There is no additional cost to scale sets. You only pay for the underlying compute resources such as the VM instances, load balancer, or Managed Disk storage. The management and automation features, such as autoscale and redundancy, incur no additional charges over the use of VMs.
Create a Scale Set – Portal
- Within the Azure portal, click on Create a Resource and search for Scale Set, selecting Virtual machine scale set
- Click on Create
- Enter in the scale set name, OS system, Resource group and location as well as desired username and password
- Under Instances, set the number of VMs in the scale set as well as VM size
- In the Autoscale section, if requiring autoscaling, enable and set parameters.
- Select the required load balancing option under the Networking section. Enter the details for the load balancing option. For example, for Load balancer, you need to enter a Public IP address name and Domain name label. Also, configure the virtual network details under Configure Virtual Networks creating a new virtual network and a new subnet if not already created.
- Click on Create.
Once Azure has deployed the resources, under the resource group the following is created
