Classic VM hung during ARM Migration and unable to even start

Question

I've got a pretty standard classic vm that I finally am getting around to get migrated to ARM. I have not done this process before, so don't really have experience with what to expect, other than "what I'm seeing now seems bad"

The migration pre-checks threw an error about the BGInfo extension, so I just went ahead and removed it. Then, the migration just kind of went into limbo. It stopped my VM and the service it was connected to. When going to the "Migrate to ARM" option in the overview for the VM, it just gives me an info item that says "Preparing resource for migration. This operation may take some time to complete"; it's been this way for about 24 hours now (the VM is just a standard A1, nothing big or complicated). There are no further options/buttons/etc that I can do on the Migrate to ARM screen to potentially cancel/revert.

The VM itself is marked as Stopped (deallocated) and refuses to start with a generic "Failed to start the virtual machine '{machine name}'. There was an error processing your request. Please try again in a few moments." I've tried a few times over the course of the past 24 hours and get the same error. Activity Log does not show any errors, just the restarts.

If it comes down to rebuilding the VM, that's annoying but I can deal with it, but this machine runs services that are used regularly by business users.

I'm at a loss as to where to go next. It smells like something is locked up behind the scenes with the migration, but I don't have visibility into it so can't seem to get anything done to get this machine back to working. Any advice would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi @JF ,

Welcome to the Microsoft Q&A platform. I don't think the issue is caused from removing the BGInfo extension. BGInfo is an extension that writes useful server information to the desktop as a wallpaper. If you create VMs from Portal you already get this extension. Once Bginfo is enabled, the VM desktop has a wallpaper like this:

Reference : start-azvm

I would suggest trying the powershell way of starting the VM using below command
Start-AzVM -ResourceGroupName "ResourceGroupxxx" -Name "Vmxxx"

If that doesn' help, you can take a snapshot of the os disk and create a disk from the snapshot and use it to create a VM from portal. Here is the document with the details, reference : create-vm-specialized-portal

Please "Accept as Answer" and Upvote if any of above helped so that, it can help others in community looking for remediation for the similar issues.

Answer 2

We did try powershell, and it didn't work. We ended up running out of time to fiddle with it, so we bought support and opened a support ticket.

Currently, it sounds like the tech support people figured out that yes, it was hung up during the migration, and they can break it out of that. I'm in the middle of setting up a meeting with them to get finalization on the issue.