Manage Administrative (Admin) State in Azure Load Balancer

Administrative State (Admin State) is a feature of Azure Load Balancer that allows you to override the Load Balancer’s health probe behavior on a per backend pool instance basis. There are three types of admin state values: Up, Down, None.

You can use the Azure portal, Azure PowerShell, or Azure CLI to manage the admin state for a backend pool instance. Each section provides instructions for each method with examples for setting, updating, or removing an admin state configuration.

Prerequisites

  • Access to the Azure portal.
  • An Azure account with an active subscription. Create an account for free
  • An existing resource group for all resources.
  • Two or more existing Virtual Machines.
  • An existing standard load balancer in the same subscription and virtual network as the virtual machines.
    • The load balancer should have a backend pool with health probes and load balancing rules attached.

Set admin state on a new backend pool instance

In this section, you learn how to set an admin state to Up or Down as part of a new backend pool create.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.
  2. In the search box at the top of the portal, enter Load balancer. Select Load balancers in the search results.
  3. Select your load balancer from the list.
  4. In your load balancer's page, select Backend pools under Settings.
  5. Select + Add in Backend pools to add a new backend pool.
  6. In the Add backend pool window, enter or select the following information:
Setting Value
Name Enter myBackendpool.
Backend Pool Configuration Select IP Address.
IP addresses
Backend Address Name Enter the name of your backend address.
IP Address Select the IP address to be added to the backend pool.
  1. Select Save.

  2. In your Backend pools page, select the corresponding Admin State value of your recently added backend pool instance.

    Screenshot of backend pools window with admin state link highlighted.

  3. In your Admin state details window, select Down from the dropdown menu.

    Screenshot of admin state details windows with down selected for admin state.

  4. Select Save.

Set admin state as part of new backend pool instance after creation

In this section, you learn how to set an admin state to Up or Down as part of a new backend pool instance add.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

  2. In the search box at the top of the portal, enter Load balancer and select Load balancers in the search results.

  3. On the load balancer's Overview page, select your load balancer from the list.

  4. In your load balancer's page, select Backend pools under Settings.

  5. Select your backend pool.

  6. In your backend pool's page, select + Add under IP configurations.

    Note

    This step is assuming your backend pool is NIC-based.

  7. Select the virtual machine you want to add to the backend pool.

  8. Select Add and Save.

  9. In your Backend pools page, select the corresponding Admin State value of your recently added backend pool instance.

  10. In your Admin state details window, select Up from the dropdown menu.

    Screenshot of admin state details window with up selected for admin state.

  11. Select Save.

Update admin state on existing backend pool instance

In this section, you learn how to update an existing admin state from existing backend pool instance by setting the value to Up or Down.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

  2. In the search box at the top of the portal, enter Load balancer and select Load balancers in the search results.

  3. Select your load balancer from the list.

  4. In your load balancer's page, select Backend pools under Settings.

  5. In your Backend pools page, select the corresponding Admin State value of your recently added backend pool instance.

  6. In your Admin state details window, select Up from the dropdown menu.

    Screenshot of admin state details window with up selected for admin state value.

  7. Select Save.

Removing admin state from existing backend pool instance

In this section, you learn how to remove an existing admin state from an existing backend pool instance. This is done by setting the admin state value to None.

  1. Sign in to the Azure portal.

  2. In the search box at the top of the portal, enter Load balancer and select Load balancers in the search results.

  3. Select your load balancer from the list.

  4. In your load balancer's page, select Backend pools under Settings.

  5. Select the corresponding Admin State value of your backend pool instance that you would like to remove.

  6. In your admin state’s window, select None from the dropdown menu.

    Screenshot of admin state details windows with none selected for admin state.

  7. Select Save.

Next Steps