New maintenance control features
Published date: September 23, 2020
The maintenance control feature gives you more control over platform maintenance operations when dealing with highly sensitive workloads. Using this feature, you can control all host updates, including rebootless updates, for up to 35-days. This functionality is generally available for Azure Dedicated Hosts and isolated VMs.
We are now offering - in Preview - the ability to declare a recurring maintenance window when Azure applies platform updates on Azure Dedicated Hosts and isolated VMs through maintenance control. Therefore, you no-longer have to apply updates manually and you can rely on Azure initiate the updates at the time you specify.
In addition, we are adding the maintenance control functionality to the ability to automatically upgrade OS images in Virtual Machine Scale Sets. You are now able to declare a daily maintenance window during which Azure will automatically apply OS images to your scale set instances. This feature is also in Preview.
During the preview period these new capabilities are not available in the Azure portal.
Learn more about scheduled maintenance with scale sets
Learn more about scheduled maintenance for host updates