Manage update settings for Azure Local

This article provides an overview of different Azure Local update settings that control how updates are applied. The default settings provide a balanced experience of update run time versus potential workload impact. Use the available controls to fine tune and optimize the update behavior to your servicing requirements.

Prioritization

When updating Azure Local, the process live migrates virtual machines between cluster member machines to ensure workloads don't experience any downtime. Live migration failures are rare but can happen, for example, due to VM misconfigurations like attaching a virtual image (ISO) stored on a local storage path instead of a shared location (CSV).

The default solution setting prioritizes completing the update over workload availability when live migrations fail.

By using the following steps, you can change this behavior so that when live migrations fail, the update process aborts.

# Prioritize workload uptime over update completion
Enable-UpdateSetting -Name SkipForceDrain

To confirm if the setting is enabled, run this command:

# Confirm setting status
Get-UpdateSetting -Name SkipForceDrain

To switch back to the default behavior, run the following command:

# Rollback to default behavior
Disable-UpdateSetting  -Name SkipForceDrain

To confirm the feature is disabled, run the following command:

# Confirm setting status
Get-UpdateSetting -Name SkipForceDrain

VM failback

Azure Local update enables maintenance mode for each node to ensure no VMs run on it before patching. After patching, the process moves the VMs running on the node back to their original location before disabling maintenance mode. To optimize the total update duration, Azure Local update disables this setting for clusters larger than 16 nodes.

For clusters up to 16 nodes, you can disable the VM failback to reduce the total update time.

To change this behavior so that VMs no longer fail back before disabling maintenance mode, use the following steps.

# Prioritize workload uptime over update completion
Disable-UpdateSetting -Name VMFailback

To enable the VM failback, run the following command:

# Prioritize workload uptime over update completion
Enable-UpdateSetting -Name VMFailback

Note

  • These commands don't work on clusters with more than 16 nodes.

Next steps