Is there a force flag in azure windows to resize a role?

Question

I tried resizing the role (up) in the Azure role and got the following error after loading

"The role size specified for the Website role in a recently downloaded package is different from the role size for this role in the currently deployed service. Resizing the role will lose all local data for the role instance. Please use the Force flag if you want to allow the loss of local data. "

which leads to the question - is there a flag of power? Where is it? How to install it?

Answer 1

It just appeared!

Updating the management portal today (October 20, 2011) added the check box "Allow virtual machine size or number of roles to be updated" in the "Deployment Update" dialog box. So I guess the shiny new Force flag!

Answer 2

The information I heard on the Azure forums is that it is not possible to resize a role without fully redeploying (and that was also my experience).

Over time, Microsoft allowed all things to be changed during the upgrade, and Mark Russinovich may have suggested in a presentation by Mix or TechEd that role resizing would be supported in the future.

The error message you receive may be an early artifact of the implementation of the size upgrade enhancement. The research that I did (and I did a lot of questions) indicates that the mentioned “Flag of Strength” has not yet been realized, although I am more than happy that it turned out to be wrong.

Answer 3

Right now, vmsize is inside the package (cspkg) that ships to AppFabric. This is a solution that is part of the assembly / packaging. So, to change it, you need to change VMSize, create the package, and then [re] deploy.

If you have a running system, you can avoid downtime using VIP Swap. He will basically get up another AT [s] in the intermediate slot with the new virtual machine size and then switch to it.

So, there are more moving parts involved, but you can still change it with little or no impact.