Hello Vishal , Welcome to MS Q&A
Yes, you need to have an Azure Virtual Machine (VM) to use the Azure Load Balancer service. The load balancer is designed to balance incoming Internet traffic to VMs or balance traffic between VMs within a Virtual Network (VNet). It can also forward external traffic to a specific VM.
Azure Load Balancer is a Layer 4 (TCP, UDP) load balancing service that distributes incoming network traffic across multiple virtual machines (VMs) or instances. To use Azure Load Balancer, you need to have backend resources to distribute the traffic to, which are typically Azure VMs.
Here are the key points:
- Backend Pool: Azure Load Balancer requires a backend pool, which consists of virtual machines or instances that will receive the traffic.
- Virtual Machines: These VMs can be in the same virtual network or across different virtual networks, depending on the type of load balancer (Basic or Standard).
- Virtual Server: The VMs in the backend pool act as virtual servers that handle the traffic distributed by the load balancer.
In summary, you do need Azure VMs to use Azure Load Balancer, as the load balancer distributes traffic to these VMs.
References:
- Virtual networks and virtual machines in Azure
- Configure an Azure load balancer for an AG VNN listener - SQL Server on Azure VMs
- Configure a Virtual Machine Scale Set with an existing Azure Standard Load Balancer
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Thanks
Deepanshu