Setting up Duplicate VM's in Azure for an Availability Set

Question

We're setting up VM's on azure in an availability set to ensure maximum uptime and perf.

We just want to have multiple identical VM's so that traffic can be distributed using Azure load balancer and also fault tolerance if one box goes down.

I'm struggling to workout how to make sure each VM is identical and also stays in sync, we are constantly adding stuff to our web VM. I get that we can create an image of VM 1 and just use that to create VM 2 and so on. But if a file gets added to VM 1 than i need to make sure that is reflected on all the other VM's as well. Is there a way to achieve this?

Any advice is appreciated.

Thanks

Answer 1

Ideally you'd store all your data in a shared and centralised location thst can be access from all VMs in the availability set, such as blob storage or an Azure Files network SMB file share.