VIRTUAL MACHINE SCALE SET CREATING (VMSS)

Intro: A VMSS is an Azure compute resource that lets you deploy and manage a set of identical, load-balanced VMs.

It’s designed for scalability: you can automatically increase or decrease the number of VMs based on demand.

Great for workloads like web apps, microservices, or big data processing.

Steps to Create a VMSS

1. Sign in and start the VMSS wizard

• Open: Azure Portal → search for “Virtual Machine” → select it.
  

• Action: Click “Create.”

• Create a resource group and give it a name eg vmss
  

1. on the basic tab
2. give the virtual machine a name lets call it vmss_vm

• Availability option, no infrastructure required
  

• Security type, standard
  

• image, windows10/11
  

• Give the vm a username and password and also choose a port, check licence and review + create
  

1. Monitoring Tab

• Disable monitoring

1. Tag tab

• tag the vm
  

• Review and create
  

After Deploying the Virtual Machine

• click on 'Go to Resource'
  

• Click on the public ip to increase the time out and save
  

ADD A DATA DISK

• on the virtual machine overview page, select settings, Disk, add disk and apply

INITIALISE THE VM AND MAKE THE DISK USABLE

• on the vm, click on connect
• Add the password
• to initialize the disk, search for disk management in the search bar of the newly deployed vm
• to format the disk, right click the unallocated disk and select new simple volume, the next, next and finish ![ ](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/ouburc6z1i0ocbmtvhmq.png
• the disk is now formatted

TO CREATE IMAGE

• Click on capture (this help to clone or duplicate the vm should there be traffic one can easily computer with same configuration) before that we are going to create a compute gallery)

• go to azure search bar and search for azure compute gallery (is use to capture image)
  

• Click +create
  

• Select the resource group already created (vmss), give it a name, select region if applicable and click on sharing method
  

• on sharing, select Role based access control (RBAC) i.e access is based on role of the role of the individual. then review and create.
  

• on the vmss, click on capture and select image
  

• in the Gallery details, Target Azure compute gallery, select the gallery created
  

• in the Target VM image definition click on create new and give it a name then click ok
  
  

• Operating system state select Specialized because it doesn't required password and username unlike the generalise which required such parameters
  

• in the Version details, set Version number and also End of life date then review and create
  

• After the deployment go to resource
  
  Note: the image captured can be use to create two things; VM and VMSS
  

1. Basics tab configuration

• Subscription & resource group: Select your subscription; create a new resource group (e.g., “rgvmss”).

• Scale set details: Name (e.g., “vmss-web-uk”), Region (e.g., UK South), Orchestration (Flexible is recommended), Image (Ubuntu or Windows).

• Authentication: SSH key (Linux) or password (Windows); set admin username.

• Instance details: Choose size (e.g., Standard_DS1_v2) and initial instance count (e.g., 2).

1. Disks tab