Hello,
We've had quite a few issues with virtual machines stopping without prior notice for several of our subscription. The only symptom we see is that the virtual machine is in a "stopped" state in the portal.
Normally this would be considered a one-time event, but we've had machines stopped for about 50% of all the subscriptions we manage and at least one machine was stopped every day for the past three weeks.
Common things for the stopped VMS: they're running Linux (Ubuntu and CentOS) and are in the Europe West region.
Unfortunately this is not the worst part. We usually spot a stopped machine in less than 5 minutes, but issuing a "start" command results in 30-90 minute start times about 50% of the time. The only way to "reduce" the time it takes to start the machine is to stop it from the command-line tools and then start it (sometimes we have to stop-start several times to prevent the machines from hanging in the "starting" state).
If it helps, here are the details for one of the affected machines:
- Subscription ID: 3d189a37-2251-4e2b-b842-fcef5f542ac0
- Deployment ID: af7a6a0a4db84ad28afde3c39fcd2494
We're part of the Azure Enterprise Agreement program and will not consider buying support for each subscription for such issues - it's understandable to have random restarts once in a while because things can go wrong with the underlying physical machines, but having your machine stopped repeatedly and having to start them manually (sometimes with a 90-minute start time) is unacceptable for a cloud platform (or for any other VM provider).
Please let me know if there's something that can be done to make sure random stops will not occur in the future. Otherwise, we'll be forced to migrate all clients back to AWS (this never happened there for more than 3 years).
Thanks!