Virtual machine scale set - Single machine mode of operation

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GoyalDharmender-8185 asked Dec 3, '21 vipullag-MSFT commented Dec 8, '21

Virtual machine scale set - Single machine mode of operation

Hello,
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machine-scale-sets/windows/ mentions a single machine mode of operation for VMSS. Can someone please direct me to more documentation, and if possible please explain the advantages of this mode?
I have a small legacy application +DB that needs to be migrated to Azure using lift and shift. I see no business or uptime reason to incur the cost of redundant/backup servers. I am hoping to use Single machine scale set mode to provide some kind of uptime support.

Thank you

azure-virtual-machines azure-virtual-machines-scale-set

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vipullag-MSFT · Dec 08, 2021 at 01:01 AM

@GoyalDharmender-8185

Just checking in to see if you got a chance to see previous response.
If the suggested response helped you resolve your issue, please 'Accept as answer', so that it can help others in the community looking for help on similar topics.

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Answer 1 · 2021-12-04T06:09:12.227Z

ravikanthk answered Dec 4, '21 GoyalDharmender-8185 commented Dec 6, '21

@GoyalDharmender-8185,

The management and automation layers are provided with scale sets to run and scale your applications. Instead, you could manually create and manage individual VMs or integrate existing tools to build a similar level of automation. The below links explains the key differences between virtual machines and scale sets -https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machine-scale-sets/overview.

There is no extra cost to scale sets. You only pay for the underlying compute resources such as the VM instances, load balancer, or Managed Disk storage. In addition, the management and automation features, such as autoscale and redundancy, incur no additional charges over the use of VMs.

I hope that helps.

Please 'Accept as answer' if the provided information is helpful to help others in the community looking for help on similar topics.

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GoyalDharmender-8185 · Dec 04, 2021 at 10:28 PM

@RaviKanth-5629 - Thanks for answering. Unfortunately this does not provide me any clarifications on what the single machine mode of operation is. I understand the overall concept of VMSS and how it does scaling up and down. Will a single machine VMSS bring back the machine in case it goes down due to any reason? I suspect that is what single machine VMSS is. But I am looking for some explanation in the Microsoft Azure documentation.

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Answer 2 · 2021-12-06T12:18:04.26Z

vipullag-MSFT answered Dec 6, '21

@GoyalDharmender-8185

VMSS is an Azure offering to handle and manage a group of load balanced VMs and it can also be used in a setup where you can configure autoscaling rules to increase the number of VM instances in a scale set if the application demand increases on the VM or distribute traffic to the VMs using a load balancer.

For your ask (migrating the legacy application + DB to Azure) in this case hosting the application on a standalone VM should be the most favorable option. It will incur the same underlying infrastructure and networking cost as that of having a single VM instance in a VMSS.
However, the perspective behind scale-sets is to manage and load balance traffic to the application hosted on the VM across multiple VM instances if the expected traffic is high.
Scale sets use the same Virtual Machine instances, but it provides high availability to your applications, and allow you to centrally manage, configure, and update a large number of VM's.

In your case you can just deploy a Virtual Machine separately, not within any scale set to host your application. If you need high availability, then you can configure the application within the VM's in a scale set.

Doc Refs:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machine-scale-sets/overview
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/overview

The single VM's you are referring in the pricing page requires flexible orchestration, and this was in preview all this while, now its GA. You can consider using normal scale set VMs for high availability over this.

Hope this helps.
Please 'Accept as answer' if the provided information is helpful to help others in the community looking for help on similar topics.

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