We are announcing the public preview of Azure Load Balancer Administrative State (Admin State) to make managing your VMs in the backendpool of Azure Load Balancer simple and effective. With Admin State, you can override your Azure Load Balancer’s health probe behavior for each individual backend pool instance (usually VMs or VMSS instances) without making changes to your network security rules or closing ports on your VM. You can set the Admin State of the backend instance to be up or down, overriding the Load Balancer health probe. This setting will change how the Load Balancer directs new or existing connections to the backend instance. With Admin State, removing virtual machines from the backend pool for usual maintenance, patching, or simply applying fixes is easy and doesn’t require any additional overhead of closing ports or updating security rules.
Admin State is available in all Azure public regions, Azure China cloud regions, and Azure Government cloud regions.
Learn more about admin state via our public documentation or our recent blog.