Delete Azure VM Instance from load balanced Cloud Service

Question

I have 2 Azure vm's (Linux) being load balanced by a public Azure Cloud Service. Both instances show in the Azure Management portal for the same cloud service. I want to take down one instance and perform some maintenance. However since the instance is still showing even though the VM has been shutdown it the Cloud Service is still directing traffic to it. How do I delete an instance from the Cloud Service or stop the Cloud Service from directing traffic to a particular VM instance? Then afterwards how does one re-associate an existing VM to that service? (i.e. change from one Cloud Service to another).

Note: SSH works into the VM but other ports used by the VM are not working acting like they are trying to go to the other VM even though the correct endpoints are created to the active VM.

Answer 1

The purpose of a port probe in a load-balanced set is for the load balancer to be able to detect whether or not a VM is able to accept traffic. When configuring the load-balanced endpoint you can specify a webpage or a TCP endpoint for the probe - and this should be present on each instance. Traffic will be directed to the VM as long as the webpage returns 200 OK or the TCP endpoint accepts the connection when the load balancer probes. You can specify the time interval between probes and the number of probes that must fail before the endpoint is deemed dead and should be taken out of rotation (defaults are every 15 seconds and 2 probes).

You can take a VM out of load-balancer rotation by ensuring that the configured probe page returns something other than 200 OK and then bring it back into rotation by having it once again send a 200 OK.

Answer 2

When I have needed to keep my webservice running and returning status of 200 I have had to resort to removing the endpoint from the load-balanced set. It is pretty simple to do but it does take usually a minute for the webPortal to remove the endpoint and then again once you recreate the endpoint to put it back in the set.