To configure an Azure Standard Load Balancer to distribute HTTPS (TCP port 443) traffic between two virtual machines (vm1 and vm2), several specific configuration steps must be followed according to Microsoft Azure Administrator documentation (“Load Balancer Standard SKU – configuration and differences”).

Remove the public IP addresses from vm1 and vm2:Azure Standard Load Balancer only supports backend resources that use private IP addresses. Virtual machines that are part of a Standard Load Balancer backend pool must not have their own Basic Public IP addresses. Therefore, both vm1 and vm2 must have their public IPs removed before they can be added to the load balancer backend pool.

Create a health probe and backend pool on lb1:A health probe is required to monitor the availability of backend VMs. The backend pool defines which VMs receive load-balanced traffic. In this case, vm1 and vm2 are added to the backend pool.

Create a load balancing rule on lb1:The load balancing rule defines how traffic is distributed — specifying frontend IP configuration, protocol (TCP), port (443), backend pool, and health probe.

This configuration allows lb1 to evenly distribute HTTPS traffic across vm1 and vm2, ensuring high availability and secure connectivity using the Standard Load Balancer’s internal/private endpoints.