Patching and Updating Virtual Machine ScaleSets

Question

As I understand, Virtual Machine Scale Sets are a collection of Virtual Machines. Each one can be destroyed and reconstituted at the whim of the configuration. The VM's are recreated from a certain image. Is this understanding is correct ?

If this is correct, how do you patch a scaleset ?

Consider a scaleset created using a Windows 2016. 50 patches are made available via the update service since the base image was created. During a heavy load, 3 new VMs are created by the scaleset. The new VMs should load 50 patches before even going on-line. That could take hours. The patches might not work at all.

What is the best practice to handle this issue ?

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 14 '19 at 01:56

I would like to suggest to create the VMSS from a custom image. You could first deploy a windows 2016 and install the 50 patches, then make this as a custom VM image. This custom VM image includes any required application installs or configurations. Any VM instances created in the scale set use the custom VM image and are ready to serve your application traffic. In this tutorial you learn how to:

Create and customize a VM

Deprovision and generalize the VM

Create a custom VM image

Deploy a scale set that uses the custom VM image

You could make it with multiple methods.

Tutorial: Create and use a custom image for virtual machine scale sets with Azure PowerShell

Tutorial: Create and use a custom image for virtual machine scale sets with the Azure CLI

Add a custom image to an Azure scale set template

That is exactly what we are anticipating, I was hoping there was a better way. — jlo-gmail, May 14 '19 at 04:18
i dont think there's anything you can do except custom image, perhaps use 2019 — 4c74356b41, May 14 '19 at 05:03

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 14 '19 at 05:24

The Windows Server images in the marketplace are continually updated (at roughly a monthly cadence) with all of the latest patches. Installing the latest version is a good starting point to keep your instances up-to-date.

In order to stay up-to-date on existing instances when new images are released, you can enable automatic OS image upgrades, which will safely update instances in a rolling fashion when a new version of the image is available.

How often are the Linux marketplace images updated though? – FoxDeploy Apr 14 '21 at 14:04 — FoxDeploy, Apr 14 '21 at 14:04

Patching and Updating Virtual Machine ScaleSets

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