Deploying an Auto-Scaling VM Scale Set with a Custom Disk Image

Once you have the file saved, go to the orange code in the file and replace it with the value from your RESOURCE ID box. With the disk image location modified, there are no other required changes to the template file.  You can save your file and deploy it.  Go back to the Deploying the Template section of this article for the steps involved in deployment.

How Do I Know It Worked?

Browse to your Resource Group in your portal and click “Overview”.  You should see the following resources running in the right pane:

• Virtual Machine Scale Set
• Load Balancer
• Public IP Address
• Virtual Network

The names of your resources will be based on what name you gave your Scale Set when you deployed it.

If you click on the scale set, and then “Instances” under “Settings”, you will see how many instances are running.

A cool test to run is to download LoadSim to your instance and jack up the CPU cycles.  As the CPU utilization rises, you will see Azure automatically deploy additional instances as part of the scale set.  You can download the LoadSim here.

But How to I Connect?

Did you notice that there is no “Connect” option that allows you to RDP into your instances?  That is “as-designed” in order to reduce costs and complexity of the need for a public IP for every instance that is spun up.  However, what you CAN do is spin up a “jump box” (another VM in Azure) and RDP to your instances from it.