- Scalability and availability for Azure Web Apps - Wed, Jun 28 2017
- Managing Azure Virtual Machine scale sets - Wed, May 31 2017
- Azure virtual machine scale sets - Mon, May 8 2017
Getting the virtual machine ID
When it comes to managing virtual machines (VMs) in a VMSS, there are some important differences compared to traditional VM management. The first thing you need to be aware of is that there are separated PowerShell cmdlets that interact with VMs.
Secondly, in order to interact with VMs in a VMSS, you need to know the instance ID of the VM you want to manage.
To figure out the ID for the VMs, you can browse the resources.azure.com portal and extract your Resource Group -> VMSS.
Here, you can easily retrieve the VM ID. You can also get the same information from the Azure Portal Instances section:
Once you have the correct instance ID for a particular VM inside the VMSS, you can start using VMSS-related PowerShell commands. The following cmdlet helps you list the basic VM information:
Get-AzureRmVmssVM -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01 -InstanceId 2
As mentioned previously, commands and outputs are different than with traditional Azure PowerShell cmdlets.
Starting and stopping VMs
Start and stop operations are also a bit different than with traditional VM implementations. As you may recall, for every single VMSS setup, you need to define a minimum instance count. This setting is quite important because by configuring a minimum instance count, you are forcing Azure to have a minimum X number of VMs available at all times, unless you stop them manually.
This is why Azure starts the minimum number of VMs you configured when you logged in to the Azure portal and started your VMSS instance.
You can start/stop/restart individual VMs or all VMs in a scale set by using PowerShell cmdlets:
Start/Stop/Restart all VMs in a scale set:
Start-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01 Stop-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01 Restart-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01
To Start/Stop/Restart an individual VM in a scale set:
Start-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01 -InstanceId 2 Stop-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01 -InstanceId 2 Restart-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName VMSS -VMScaleSetName vmss01 -InstanceId 2
Changing the current capacity
You can also change the current capacity of your scale set manually without using auto-scale metrics. The following command gives you the current capacity details:
(Get-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName vmss -VMScaleSetName VMSS01).sku
Using the .sku property, you can change the current count to 4:
$vmssConfig = Get-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName vmss -VMScaleSetName VMSS01 $vmssConfig.sku.capacity = 4 Update-AzureRmVmss -ResourceGroupName vmss -Name VMSS01 -VirtualMachineScaleSet $vmssConfig
This will change the “Current number of instances” property to 4 and will fire up two additional VMs for my VMSS configuration.
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How do I create a new instance without scaling? For example, I have 2 instances (which was my minimum number of instance) running in my scale set and I set up the scaling upto 100 instances. Can I create/start a new instance manually without triggering a scaling?