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Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Manage and scale up to thousands of Linux and Windows VMs.
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Overview

Create and manage thousands of virtual machines at scale

Build, on your terms, large-scale services for batch, big data, and container workloads using Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets, which let you create and manage a group of heterogeneous load-balanced virtual machines (VMs). Increase or decrease the number of VMs automatically in response to demand or based on a schedule you define. Centrally manage, configure, and update thousands of VMs and provide higher availability and security for your applications.
  • Develop dynamically scalable applications with Virtual Machine Scale Sets. Rightsize your infrastructure based on demand while optimizing costs. Simplify management and increase the resiliency of your business-critical applications at scale.
  • Automate the creation and deployment of your VMs and automatically issue OS updates for improved compliance and security. Centralize your templates for a consistent rollout of your applications. Increase your focus on the application and avoid additional storage configuration or network management tasks. Deploy Virtual Machine Scale Sets using Azure Resource Manager templates—with support for Windows and Linux platform images and custom images and extensions.
  • Increase application uptime by using availability zones and availability sets to automatically distribute VMs in a scale set within a single datacenter or across multiple datacenters. Scale sets run multiple VM instances of your application. Therefore, if one of these instances has a problem, your customers will continue to access your application with minimal disruption. Virtual Machine Scale Sets guarantee up to 99.99% service-level agreements (SLAs) for your VMs.
  • Optimize costs by minimizing the number of unnecessary VM instances that run your application when demand is low. Use your existing licenses to run Windows Server VMs on Azure with Azure Hybrid Benefit and combine Azure Reserved Virtual Machine Instances with Azure Hybrid Benefit to achieve additional savings. Run interruptible workloads with Azure Spot Virtual Machines on scale sets and realize up to 90% cost savings versus pay-as-you-go rates.
  • Get full control of the individual VMs within your scale set and ensure high availability at scale with Virtual Machines Scale Sets flexible orchestration mode. Change VM sizes without redeploying your scale set for increased operational agility. Mix Azure Spot Virtual Machines and pay-as-you-go VMs in the same scale set to optimize your costs. Manage VMs and VM scale sets using the same APIs. Accelerate your deployments by defining fault domains during the VM creation process.
  • Use only the compute resources your application needs at any time without pre-provisioning your VMs. Be future-ready and let Azure autoscale your cloud infrastructure to meet your changing performance requirements. Scale sets are elastic and designed to support your scale-out workloads, including stateless web front ends, container orchestration, and microservices clusters. Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) and Azure Service Fabric run on Virtual Machine Scale Sets.
  • Take advantage of the integration of Virtual Machine Scale Sets and Azure networking resources, such as Azure Load Balancer, to reduce cloud infrastructure management costs. Easily spread your workloads across the virtual machines in your scale sets and configure network address translation (NAT) rules to connect to specific virtual machine instances for troubleshooting. Focus more on what matters—your application—and less on the infrastructure.
Features
Key features

Quickly create and deploy VMs

Create and deploy thousands of VMs in minutes with built-in load balancing and autoscaling based on centralized templates.

Manage and autoscale your VMs

Manage and autoscale your VM pool based on customizable metrics, and consistently control and deploy VM updates.

Increase availability

Increase the availability of your stateful and stateless applications across availability zones and fault domains at a large scale.

Choose VM images and consumption models

Choose VM images and consumption models that best fit your needs while gaining full control of individual VMs within a scale set.

Built-in security and compliance 

Microsoft has committed to investing $20 billion in cybersecurity over five years.
We employ more than 8,500 security and threat intelligence experts across 77 countries.
Azure has one of the largest compliance certification portfolios in the industry.
Learn more about security on Azure
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Pricing

Virtual Machine Scale Sets pricing

Virtual Machine Scale Sets are currently available for all Windows or Linux VM sizes on Azure. You are only charged for the VMs you deploy and any additional underlying infrastructure resources consumed, such as storage and networking. There are no incremental charges for the Virtual Machine Scale Sets service itself.
See Virtual Machine Scale Sets pricing
Customer stories

Trusted across industries, by companies of all sizes

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Logo of LightSail featuring stylized sail graphic with text "The Literacy Solution".
“It could have cost us millions of dollars to move our intellectual property without the support Microsoft provides. Our patented software represents a significant investment.”
Steven Gittleson, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer at LightSail
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“Before we began using Azure, staff estimated that our overloaded render farm was the primary contributor to overtime. Today, we're 80 percent more efficient on rendering and have reduced overtime by almost 90 percent.”
Duncan McWilliam, Founder and Chief Executive Office at Outpost VFX
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Resources
Documentation and resources
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Create a Virtual Machine Scale Set with the Azure CLI

Take the quickstart
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Create a Virtual Machine Scale Set in the Azure portal

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Create a Virtual Machine Scale Set with Azure PowerShell

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Virtual Machine Scale Sets documentation

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Build a scalable application with Virtual Machine Scale Sets

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