Maintenance configurations give you the ability to control and manage updates for many Azure virtual machine resources. Azure frequently updates its infrastructure to improve reliability, performance, security or launch new features. Most updates are transparent to users, but some sensitive workloads, like gaming, media streaming, and financial transactions, can't tolerate even few seconds of a VM freezing or disconnecting for maintenance. We currently support three scopes for scheduling and managing updates:

- Host: Manage updates that don’t require a reboot on isolated virtual machines, isolated virtual machine scale sets and, dedicated hosts

- OS image: Apply updates to operating system disks on uniform virtual machine scale sets and flexible virtual machine scale sets

- Guest: Install updates to Linux virtual machines, Windows virtual machines, and Azure Arc-enabled servers.

To learn more about maintenance configurations, checkout Managing VM updates with Maintenance Configurations.