I turned off several Azure VMs a few months ago, but they are no longer listed or available in my account.
Does anyone know if they auto-delete them if they have been switched off?
No, they wont get deleted and on top of that they will continue to cost you something. If you deallocated them using portal\cli\powershell\rest api, they will only cost whatever their storage costs. if you just did shutdown from inside the VM they will incur full cost.
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I've "Visual Studio Enterprise" azure subscription. I initially got few credits. I think it was $200 for free. Earlier it used to show static remaining credit i.e. if I built two VMs and it cost $50 it would show $150. But since few days may be just past day remaining credit is continuously reducing.
The activities I have done so far. Earlier I was unable to connect to VM as outgoing connection was not allowed from my organisation. Since I have got permission I'm able to connect. After that I installed Active Directory Services on one of the VM.
I don't think till this step my credit amount got reduced except for the VMs I built.
I was trying to start and stop the VM using powershell but I wasn't able to do so. So I installed powershell azure modules. using Connect-AzAccount to connect and then used Start-AzVM and Stop-AzVm to start and stop the VMs. Just to clarify I keep the VMs in shut down mode so I don't keep getting billed.
Still the amount is being deducted. I ran Disconnect-AzAccount on suspicion that it might be causing the issue but still it hasn't fixed the issue.
Can any one help here?
There are mainly two ways to stop VM:
Stop the Azure VM locally: When you connect to the Azure VM with remote desktop, go to the Power options within Windows and select Shutdown, this will essentially “turn off” the VM and stop it from running. However, even though the VM won’t be running you WILL still be paying for the Virtual machine hardware allocation. Doing this will cause the Azure Portal to report the status of the VM to be “Stopped”.
Another way is to click Stop in the virtual machine page on the portal(or use Azure PowerShell or Azure CLI). Instead of just shutting down the Operating System, Azure will also deallocate the hardware (CPU and Memory) allocation. Doing this will cause the Azure Portal to report the status of the VM to be “Stopped (Deallocated)”.
Overall, both methods will reduce cost but not none of cost. You do still pay for the Azure Storage account usage, which is used for storig the VM’s .vhd disk image file. As a result, you will still incur some cost for the storage, but at least you will save on the VM resources.
Ref: Properly Shutdown Azure VM to Save Money
You need to identify what resource are been billed when VM is stopped or Stopped De-allocated.
Check the Cost analysis under Cost Management to identify the resource. Note that when VM is stopped you still pay for storage and other resources depending in your setup.
I don't know how I had two virtual machines in Windows Azure, one application server that was stopped and one running database server, and all of a sudden, the machines no longer exist.
I have these questions:
is there a way to restore the machines?
if not is there a way to delete the storage?
Go to Virtual Machines.
Click on Disks.
Click on any remaining disks.
Click on Delete Disk - there is an option to "retain", so make sure you choose delete.
Once all the disks are deleted, then delete the storage container.
You can delete the storage with the help of steps specified in the below post
Follow this post steps
You may have hit a billing limit for a subscription with a limit. This typically happens with MSDN and Trial accounts. Once the limit is hit, Microsoft deletes any VMs running in the subscription. For IaaS VMs the actual disks still exist in storage and the VMs can be rehydrated from there once the account has some money in it or the monthly limit is reset by a new month starting. For PaaS instances, the package and configuration file is presumably still deployed to Windows Azure so, again, the service can be rehydrated when the account is flush with money.
I'm testing Azure using my MSDN account.
All went well, until I went over my spending limit, after which my services were suspended.
After my account was re-enabled, I wanted to start my Virtual Machines again.
However they keep having status 'Starting'.
The user-interface of the Azure management portal seems to offer no methods to remedy this situation.
Any ideas on how to reset these servers, or find a way to determine what is keeping them from finishing the starting process?
do not delete it, you can use azure powershell to stop it and start it again. the keep disks lost one of vhd's when we tried to do it that way.
I am experiencing the same issues and don't know the cause, but you temporarily fix it by deleting the Virtual Machine - you will get the option to delete or keep the associated disks - KEEP THEM.
After about 10-15 minutes, the disks will appear in the My Disks part of the Create Virtual Machine gallery - allowing you to re-create the machine with the same disks. You can also reuse the same name etc.
SO I have been using the azure 3 month trial, to test out whether I want to use Microsoft Azure to host a project I am working on, however I have been very confused as I have run out of "Geo Redundant Storage" in the first month and I don't really understand why.
I have read this: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/ and the only thing I can make of it, is that it takes an average of how much storage you are using across a month, eg as long as I am using less then 35gb (for a 35gb limit) on average of storage space I am in the clear.
So under my Azure Subscriptsions 'STORAGE (GB/MONTH) - GEO REDUNDANT' it says '101.027% of 35 GB/month' (so I have reached my cap).
But I don't understand why this would be happening, all I have is a simple server with a nodejs web application and a redis database (pretty much an empty at the moment), all running on an ubuntu VM, and as I can't login and check storage now because it is disabled, but I am pretty sure it is nowhere even near 35gb total storage and never has been?
I am hoping someone can explain how the azure storage is charged or if I have missed something silly?
Edit: It just hit me that it could be redis, doing crazy things with IO? not sure if this is possible, but if it is, would I be better to use locally redundant storage and pay for locally redundant storage transactions?
Edit 2: On my graph it says I had been using 1.96gb / day. So that means its not the total harddrive space per month, is it harddrive space / day? (using 2gbs of data probably sounds about right with the OS included, if this is the case, that means they give you less then 2gb space on the trial, seems minute??)
This caused due to the limitation on the geo redundant storage I have faced the same issue to fix this just disable geo redundant storage from the Windows Azure preview portal.
Open the Windows Azure preview portal.
Select Storage left.
The select your storage.
Click Configure on the top.
Turn off geo-replication.
I hope this will help.
This is probably caused by the image of your Ubuntum VM. If you read the pricing details (the link in your question) you'll see this:
Compute hours do not include any Windows Azure Storage costs
associated with the image running in Windows Azure Virtual Machines. These costs are billed separately.
How large was the VM you created?
I have been doing some test and realized that when I stop a VM, I get a red warning saying that it still generates charges.
But on which basis ?
Furthermore, on some VM I created, the system without any reason starts fooling and reach a 98% CPU during several hours with no way to stop it or to connect with RDP. VM was totally dead and it's only after several hours that the stop command from the control panel succeeded.
Hope I will not been charged for this ? Who is able to decide if my VM is OK or fooling like a crazy horse ?
Moreover, is there any software allowing to transfer my VMs from Azure to my local system, and delete them on Azure to stop any charge ? for a simple backup with possibility to restore/restart them later ? Or to run them in my own hyper-V ?
Best regards
CS
Even if your VM is stopped, you still have resources that have been reserved for your VM (think of storage space, memory, CPU, ...) and these can't be 'sold' to anyone else. Deleting the VM will free these resoures and you'll no longer be charged.
Remember that Virtual Machines are still in preview, meaning things can go bad sometimes. And yes you'll be charged for this, but during the preview you get a 33% discount (more info here: https://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/pricing/details/).
The persistent disks of your VMs are stored in a storage account as page blobs. Using tools like Azure Storage Explorer, CloudXplorer, CloudBerry, ... you can download these VHD files and simply mount them in Hyper-V (You'll need to remember that you'll need a license if you want to run the machine on-premises).
Note that, if you simply delete the VM the disks won't be deleted (they will stay in your storage account). In that case you only pay for storage (which is very cheap).
The price of VM depends on their size and nature (prenium or not).
Also you have to pay for the storage, but a 120GB disks is not billed fully, only effectively used space is.
You can use IaaS Managament Studio to easily calculate how much your blob disk cost, and see links to pricing pages of azure.