{"id":5092,"date":"2015-11-11T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-11T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/blog\/azure-vm-scale-sets-public-preview"},"modified":"2025-09-18T08:19:17","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T15:19:17","slug":"azure-vm-scale-sets-public-preview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/azure.microsoft.com\/en-us\/blog\/azure-vm-scale-sets-public-preview\/","title":{"rendered":"Azure VM Scale Sets public preview"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Updated April 20, 2016: <\/em>Azure VM Scale Sets are now generally available. The GA announcement is here: Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets GA<\/a>, and the product page is here: Virtual Machine Scale Sets<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today we are announcing the public preview of Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets. VM Scale Sets are an Azure Compute resource you can use to deploy and manage a collection of virtual machines as a set. Scale sets are well suited for building large-scale services targeting big compute, big data, and containerized workloads \u2013 all of which are increasing in significance as cloud computing continues to evolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Scale set VMs are configured identically, you just choose how many you need, which enables them to scale out and in rapidly and automatically.\u00a0Integrating with Azure Insights Autoscale<\/a>, they provide true autoscale with no need to pre-provision VMs, allowing you to use only the compute resources your application needs at any time. You can deploy VM Scale Sets using Azure Resource Manager templates and they support Windows and Linux platform images, as well as custom images and extensions. VM Scale Sets also integrate with Azure networking resources such as Load Balancers and Network Security Groups, making it easy to spread workloads across the VMs of a VM Scale Set, and to configure NAT rules so that you can connect to specific VM instances for troubleshooting.\"graphical<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When you define a VM Scale Set, you only define the resources you need, like VMs, NICs, and VM extensions, once in the VM Scale Set properties. Unlike with single-instance VMs, you do not need to independently define and correlate network, storage and extension resources for individual VMs. Besides making it easier to define your Azure infrastructure, this also allows Azure to optimize calls to the underlying fabric, providing greater efficiency.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The elastic nature of VM Scale Sets makes them ideal for supporting scale-out workloads like stateless web front ends and container orchestration or microservices clusters. In fact, the Azure Container Service makes use of VM Scale Sets as the foundation for the Mesos clusters it creates and manages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Deploying a VM Scale Set<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

To deploy a scale set, all you need is an Azure subscription. We\u2019ve put some example Virtual Machine Scale Set templates in the azure-quickstart-templates<\/a> GitHub repository, and will be adding more during the course of the preview.<\/p>\n\n\n

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I go through some of the scale set template details in this short video:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can find the example template I use here: 201-vmss-linux-nat<\/a>. This template creates a VM Scale Set consisting of Linux VMs that are assigned to a Load Balancer with a public IP address that spreads HTTP traffic across the instances, and also defines NAT rules to allow you to SSH to each VM in the set. Like other Quickstart templates, you can deploy it by selecting the \"Deploy\" button.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Doing this takes you to the Azure portal, which prompts you to specify the template\u2019s parameters:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

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