Public Preview: Automatic Zone Placement for Virtual Machine Scale Sets

Automatic Zone Placement for VM Scale Sets (Public Preview) enables Azure to automatically select the best availability zones for your scale set based on SKU availability, capacity, and placement requirements. Instead of manually maintaining zone lists for each region, customers can use a consistent configuration across regions while Azure handles zone selection.

Key benefits include:

• Simplified multi-region deployments with no region-specific zone management.
• Capacity-aware zone selection to improve deployment and scale-out success.
• Flexible resiliency controls that let you define zone spread and per-zone capacity limits.
• Greater allocation flexibility by allowing Azure to use additional eligible zones when needed.
• Support for both new and existing VM Scale Sets using Uniform or Flexible orchestration modes.

By default, Automatic Zone Placement distributes instances evenly across three availability zones, maintains a minimum spread across two zones, limits any single zone to 50% of total instances, and can expand into additional zones if required for scaling. Customers can further customize eligible zones, zone count, balancing behavior, and capacity distribution to meet workload needs.

The feature only affects placement of new VM instances and does not rebalance existing VMs. Existing deployments can use Automatic Zone Balance to correct zone imbalances.

Automatic Zone Placement is available in public preview through the Azure portal, CLI, PowerShell, and REST API. To get started, register the Microsoft.Compute/VmssAutomaticZonePlacement AFEC, use Compute API version March 1, 2026 or later, and configure a VM Scale Set with the Auto zone placement policy.