azure - Azure VM scaling, able to set the initial instance count?

Question

Have a several IaaS VM running under an internal load balancer in Azure, for scaling, is it possible to set an initial instance count rather than starting from the minimum count. Thanks

Answer 1

If you are using the classic auto-scaling option that has been available for a while now, you should take a look at the templates and Azure Scale Sets functionality - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-vmss-walkthrough/ It appears to allow to you provide a starting instance count.

Answer 2

This isn't quite as easy as "set it in the portal", but it should still be relatively easy. If you go to one of the VMSS templates in the Azure Quickstart Templates repo (e.g. https://github.com/Azure/azure-quickstart-templates/tree/master/201-vmss-windows-nat), and click on "Deploy To Azure", it will take you to portal and allow you to deploy with the parameters you want from the UI. One caveat is that you won't be able to change the size from portal though.

Hope this helps :)

Actually, thinking about this a bit more, you might be able to change the size from the UI once it's been created. If you deploy the VMSS, then at a later point in time click on the "Deploy To Azure" button again, it will take you to the portal again. If you deploy with the exact same parameters but just change the capacity, it might scale the VMSS to the number of VMs you desire (theoretically, deployments are supposed to only deploy the parts of infrastructure that haven't already been deployed, but I haven't tested it with this particular template, so it's possible that something breaks).