virtual machine has been preempted, This low-priority virtual machine is being stopped and deallocated

Question

I am checking the Resource Health of a Virtual Machine infrequent, One of my Azure Virtual Machine statuses is showing as "We are currently unable to determine the health of this virtual machine and automatic preemted in low-priority" for the past 25 days. In previes health showing same issue. Can anyone explain why this resource health is showing as "We are currently unable to determine the health of this virtual machine and This virtual machine has been preempted, This low-priority virtual machine is being stopped and deallocated"

Answer 1

Hi @Anonymous ,
Thanks for posting your query on Microsoft QnA.
I understand you have some queries around why your low-priority VM is being preempted.
To start with, low priority VMs are effectively discounted VMs that are allocated from the unused capacity of Azure VMs in a particular region, to anyone who requests for it. They are heavily discounted and available to run workloads running in Batch.
These VMs take advantage of surplus capacity in Azure. The tradeoff for using low-priority VMs is that those VMs may not always be available to be allocated, or may be preempted at any time, depending on available capacity. For this reason, low-priority VMs are most suitable for batch and asynchronous processing workloads where the job completion time is flexible, and the work is distributed across many VMs.
Hence, you see these resource health events in order, first it notifies that the low-priority VM is being preempted, followed by it is being stopped and deallocated, then finally it shows that the health cannot be determined because the VM has been moved to a deallocated state.

Hope this answers your query. For any questions, feel free to reach back and tag me, I'll be happy to answer.
Also, please refer to the below to links that I have shared, it explains the concept of low-priority VMs in more detail.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/batch/batch-spot-vms
https://whyazure.in/what-you-should-know-about-azures-low-priority-vms-and-possible-use-cases/

Please note that pre-emptible VMs can be of two types- low priority VMs (legacy type) and Spot VMs, both have the same functionality/use-case.

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