when I delete a VM's endpoint, visit public ip failed

Question

This is an windows azure issue: I have 2 load balance Virtual Machines and run my software on them, when one machine's service is down, I try to delete its public endpoint to make my software can be visited so I will have time to fix the bad one. Now when I delete it, I can't not visit the public IP for a few minutes, it seems like there has a restart time for deleting an endpoint? So who can tell me why? And If there is 3 load balance machine and I delete one will be better?

(sorry for the bad English, hope you will understand me)

Answer 1

You shouldn't be deleting the endpoint. For Virtual Machines, traffic on a load-balanced endpoint is sent across your set of Virtual Machines on that endpoint. If you want to remove one of those instances from the traffic flow, you need to set up a custom health probe. Aside from general failures (like your Virtual Machine rebooting or its hardware having issues), Windows Azure won't know if your individual Virtual Machine is healthy or not. With a custom probe handler, the Virtual Machine simply return a 200 when healthy, and non-200 when it wants to be removed from the load balancer (until checked again).

See this MSDN reference article for details around custom probes for load-balanced endpoints. Also: Michael Washam wrote a post that gives a nice overview of Virtual Machines (including custom probes). See his additional post to see how to configure custom probes through PowerShell.