Initiated a Delete of Instances in a Virtual Machine scale but instances not deleting.

Question

Initiated a Delete of Instances in a Virtual Machine scale but instances not deleting.

Robert Pell 20

Ankit Yadav 6,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-19T00:06:04.45+00:00
If earlier shared commands were not helpful to delete the VM instance, kindly help us by answering the following questions to better understand the issue.

Were the VMs in a running state when you tried to delete the instances? Were there any restart, reimage, or redeploy operations ongoing when you attempted to delete them?

Do you have auto-scaling enabled on the VMSS, which might be causing the VMs to be recreated?

Are you trying to delete the VMs via the Azure Portal or Azure CLI? If it’s through the Azure Portal, did you receive any notifications regarding the delete action, or encounter any errors in the notifications?

Have you reviewed the activity logs for the VMs to verify if the delete operation was actually executed?
Ankit Yadav 6,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-19T21:23:13.57+00:00

Hello Robert Pell,
Just checking in to see if you were able to delete the VMSS instances.
If not, kindly try out the commands I shared earlier and try deleting them via Azure CLI or PowerShell.

Let me know if you run into any snags or if those steps help get the job done.
Ankit Yadav 6,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-21T09:18:44.8033333+00:00

Hello Robert Pell,

If the query has been resolved, please take a moment to accept answers and upvote it 👍 to make it helpful to the community.

Thank you for helping to improve Microsoft Q&A!

Answer accepted by question author

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Your answer

Ankit Yadav 6,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-19T00:06:04.45+00:00

If earlier shared commands were not helpful to delete the VM instance, kindly help us by answering the following questions to better understand the issue.

Were the VMs in a running state when you tried to delete the instances? Were there any restart, reimage, or redeploy operations ongoing when you attempted to delete them?

Do you have auto-scaling enabled on the VMSS, which might be causing the VMs to be recreated?

Are you trying to delete the VMs via the Azure Portal or Azure CLI? If it’s through the Azure Portal, did you receive any notifications regarding the delete action, or encounter any errors in the notifications?

Have you reviewed the activity logs for the VMs to verify if the delete operation was actually executed?
Ankit Yadav 6,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-19T21:23:13.57+00:00

Hello Robert Pell,
Just checking in to see if you were able to delete the VMSS instances.
If not, kindly try out the commands I shared earlier and try deleting them via Azure CLI or PowerShell.

Let me know if you run into any snags or if those steps help get the job done.
Ankit Yadav 6,345 Reputation points Microsoft External Staff Moderator

2025-09-21T09:18:44.8033333+00:00

Hello Robert Pell,

If the query has been resolved, please take a moment to accept answers and upvote it 👍 to make it helpful to the community.

Thank you for helping to improve Microsoft Q&A!

Answer 1

Hello Robert Pell,

Please try to delete the VM instance manually using below Azure CLI command and let us know if it fails/throws any error:

First get the Instance ID of the VM which you want to delete using below command:

az vmss list-instances --resource-group <your-resource-group> --name <your-vmss-name> --out table

then try to delete the VM with the instance ID using below command:

az vmss delete-instances --resource-group <your-resource-group> --name <your-vmss-name> --instance-ids <instance-id>

Alternatively, you could use Powershell command too:

Remove-AzVmss -ResourceGroupName "Group002" -VMScaleSetName "VMScaleSet002" -InstanceId "<instance-id>"

Reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.compute/remove-azvmss?view=azps-14.4.0#example-2-remove-a-virtual-machine-from-within-a-vmss

or if you are just looking to reduce the VM instance count from the VMSS, you could try scale-in operation on the VMSS.
Sample Azure CLI command:

az vmss scale --resource-group <your-resource-group> --name <your-vmss-name> --new-capacity <desired-instance-count>

Let me know if it helps to delete the VM instance!!

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Initiated a Delete of Instances in a Virtual Machine scale but instances not deleting.

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