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Instance Protection for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Set instances

  • Article

Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets enable better elasticity for your workloads through Autoscale, so you can configure when your infrastructure scales-out and when it scales-in. Scale sets also enable you to centrally manage, configure, and update a large number of VMs through different upgrade policy settings. You can configure an update on the scale set model and the new configuration is applied automatically to every scale set instance if you've set the upgrade policy to Automatic or Rolling.

As your application processes traffic, there can be situations where you want specific instances to be treated differently from the rest of the scale set instance. For example, certain instances in the scale set could be performing long-running operations, and you don't want these instances to be scaled-in until the operations complete. You might also have specialized a few instances in the scale set to perform additional or different tasks than the other members of the scale set. You require these 'special' VMs not to be modified with the other instances in the scale set. Instance protection provides the additional controls to enable these and other scenarios for your application.

This article describes how you can apply and use the different instance protection capabilities with scale set instances.

Types of instance protection

Scale sets provide two types of instance protection capabilities:

  • Protect from scale-in

    • Enabled through protectFromScaleIn property on the scale set instance
    • Protects instance from Autoscale initiated scale-in
    • User-initiated instance operations (including instance delete) are not blocked
    • Operations initiated on the scale set (upgrade, reimage, deallocate, etc.) are not blocked

  • Protect from scale set actions

    • Enabled through protectFromScaleSetActions property on the scale set instance
    • Protects instance from Autoscale initiated scale-in
    • Protects instance from operations initiated on the scale set (such as upgrade, reimage, deallocate, etc.)
    • User-initiated instance operations (including instance delete) are not blocked
    • Delete of the full scale set is not blocked

Protect from scale-in

Instance protection can be applied to scale set instances after the instances are created. Protection is applied and modified only on the instance model and not on the scale set model.

There are multiple ways of applying scale-in protection on your scale set instances as detailed in the examples below.

Azure portal

You can apply scale-in protection through the Azure portal to an instance in the scale set. You cannot adjust more than one instance at a time. Repeat the steps for each instance you want to protect.

  1. Go to an existing Virtual Machine Scale Set.
  2. Select Instances from the menu on the left, under Settings.
  3. Select the name of the instance you want to protect.
  4. Select the Protection Policy tab.
  5. In the Protection Policy blade, select the Protect from scale-in option.
  6. Select Save.

REST API

The following example applies scale-in protection to an instance in the scale set.

PUT on `/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets/{vmScaleSetName}/virtualMachines/{instance-id}?api-version=2019-03-01`

{
  "properties": {
    "protectionPolicy": {
      "protectFromScaleIn": true
    }
  }        
}

Note

With Flexible orchestration mode, instance protection is only supported with API version 2023-09-01 and above. For Uniform orchestration mode, instance protection is available with API version 2019-03-01 and above.

Azure PowerShell

Use the Update-AzVmssVM cmdlet to apply scale-in protection to your scale set instance.

The following example applies scale-in protection to an instance in the scale set having instance ID 0.

Update-AzVmssVM `
  -ResourceGroupName "myResourceGroup" `
  -VMScaleSetName "myVMScaleSet" `
  -InstanceId 0 `
  -ProtectFromScaleIn $true

Azure CLI 2.0

Use az vmss update to apply scale-in protection to your scale set instance.

The following example applies scale-in protection to an instance in the scale set having instance ID 0.

az vmss update \  
  --resource-group <myResourceGroup> \
  --name <myVMScaleSet> \
  --instance-id 0 \
  --protect-from-scale-in true

Protect from scale set actions

Instance protection can be applied to scale set instances after the instances are created. Protection is applied and modified only on the instance model and not on the scale set model.

Protecting an instance from scale set actions also protects the instance from Autoscale initiated scale-in.

There are multiple ways of applying scale set actions protection on your scale set instances as detailed in the examples below.

Azure portal

You can apply protection from scale set actions through the Azure portal to an instance in the scale set. You cannot adjust more than one instance at a time. Repeat the steps for each instance you want to protect.

  1. Go to an existing Virtual Machine Scale Set.
  2. Select Instances from the menu on the left, under Settings.
  3. Select the name of the instance you want to protect.
  4. Select the Protection Policy tab.
  5. In the Protection Policy blade, select the Protect from scale set actions option.
  6. Select Save.

REST API

The following example applies protection from scale set actions to an instance in the scale set.

PUT on `/subscriptions/{subscriptionId}/resourceGroups/{resourceGroupName}/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets/{vMScaleSetName}/virtualMachines/{instance-id}?api-version=2019-03-01`

{
  "properties": {
    "protectionPolicy": {
      "protectFromScaleIn": true,
      "protectFromScaleSetActions": true
    }
  }        
}

Note

Instance protection is only supported with API version 2019-03-01 and above.
Protecting an instance from scale set actions also protects the instance from Autoscale initiated scale-in. You can't specify "protectFromScaleIn": false when setting "protectFromScaleSetActions": true

Azure PowerShell

Use the Update-AzVmssVM cmdlet to apply protection from scale set actions to your scale set instance.

The following example applies protection from scale set actions to an instance in the scale set having instance ID 0.

Update-AzVmssVM `
  -ResourceGroupName "myResourceGroup" `
  -VMScaleSetName "myVMScaleSet" `
  -InstanceId 0 `
  -ProtectFromScaleIn $true `
  -ProtectFromScaleSetAction $true

Azure CLI 2.0

Use az vmss update to apply protection from scale set actions to your scale set instance.

The following example applies protection from scale set actions to an instance in the scale set having instance ID 0.

az vmss update \  
  --resource-group <myResourceGroup> \
  --name <myVMScaleSet> \
  --instance-id 0 \
  --protect-from-scale-in true \
  --protect-from-scale-set-actions true

Troubleshoot

No protectionPolicy on scale set model

Instance protection is only applicable on scale set instances and not on the scale set model.

No protectionPolicy on scale set instance model

By default, protection policy is not applied to an instance when it is created.

You can apply instance protection to scale set instances after the instances are created.

Not able to apply instance protection

Instance protection is only supported with API version 2019-03-01 and above. Check the API version being used and update as required. You might also need to update your PowerShell or CLI to the latest version.

Next steps

Learn how to deploy your application on Virtual Machine Scale Sets.