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I have 2 VM machines on Azure. One suddenly stopped responding. It was down for around 30 minutes, until I just browsed into the Azure portal, and then I saw it was in the Starting state, and then it was up & running again.

How can I tell why my VM was shutdown?

Adel Khayata
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Himberjack
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2 Answers2

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EDIT: I'm assuming you're talking about Virtual Machines (IaaS), and not Cloud Services (PaaS).

Virtual Machines can, and will, restart, for several reasons. For example:

  • Hardware failure, where your Virtual Machine will then be restarted on another server.
  • Host OS refresh. This is the operating system running the physical server.
  • Some type of OS crash

Also keep in mind: Virtual Machines are in Preview with no SLA today. So there wouldn't be any information readily available to you for determining why your Virtual Machine became unavailable.

If it was unavailable for 30 minutes, then this hints at something akin to a host OS update or your virtual machine being moved. If it was down for, say, 5 minutes, then I'd guess it was an OS crash.

UPDATE I just looked at the Azure Dashboard which is showing degraded Compute with Virtual Machines (see RSS feed with problem description). Perhaps this is the root cause of your particular outage...

David Makogon
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  • Is there any chance that auto scaling restarted or shutdown the servers ? As we had the same issue today and it was from 30mins-1h downtime and there are no logs of downtime in monitoring graphs. – khorvat Nov 13 '13 at 08:44
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there are several things that might cause this to happen, your VM may have been crashed due to bad coding or bad development, the second reason I think is that the number of VM you created is not enough to the incoming traffic. this could cause your VM to restart if the number of incoming traffic is more than the number of VMs can handle.

hhaggan
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  • If it's a Virtual Machine, it won't be restarted due to traffic. It would behave like any other server. Crashing, possibly. Restarting due to load? No, unless there's some type of watchdog app that does this within the Virtual Machine itself. – David Makogon Mar 08 '13 at 03:21