How can I activate the multiple Availability Zone option?(without VMSS)

Question

Hello,

I'm following a video of someone creating a VM with the option of selecting multiple availability zones 1,2,3. For some reason, I don't have this option, can only select one zone at a time. I don't have the checkmark boxes next to my zone like in the sample picture. Also, I don't have the message popup stating "You can select multiple zones. Selecting multiple zones will create one VM per zone."

I tried different locations and had the same problem.

The only way I can receive the option for using zone 1,2,3 is if I create a virtual machine scale set. I'm not sure what to do or if something has changed.

Answer 1

Hello A.D. Bailey

Welcome to Microsoft Q&A Platform, thanks for posting your query here.

From Azure Portal, as per the screenshot shared I tried creating a VM in East US with Ubuntu and I am able to create VM in multiple Zones.

It's possible that you are not able to select the availability zones in the Azure portal due to a quota limitation on your subscription. Please check that once.

Also, try to create an Azure VM with multiple availability zones using the Azure CLI, you can use the az vm create command with the --zone {1, 2, 3} parameter and see if that succeeds.

Here's an example command:

az vm create \
  --resource-group <resource-group-name> \
  --name <vm-name> \
  --image <image-name> \
  --admin-username <username> \
  --admin-password <password> \
  --size <vm-size> \
  --zone "1,2,3" \
  --location <location>

Please note that not all VM sizes and regions support multiple availability zones, list them using below command and try to deploy that VM.

Ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/cli/azure/vm?view=azure-cli-latest#az-vm-list-skus-examples

Hope this helps.