VM switched off by itself followed by change of public IP

Question

I was working away via RDP connection when the connection suddenly dropped. Could not connect again. Logged into portal to discover VM was in an off state, with a change of public IP! In all my years, I've never seen anything as inexplicable as this. Anyone seen or heard of the same? How can this happen? I am the only admin in my tenant. It is my own tenant with one machine.

Thanks

Answer 1

Hi @Nadim J ,

I am not 100% sure what happened.
But may the host your VM was running on had a issue/failure and your VM was moved to another host automatically.

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(If the reply was helpful please don't forget to upvote and/or accept as answer, thank you)

Regards
Andreas Baumgarten

Answer 2

@Nadim J It's rare but I think @Andreas Baumgarten is correct in that this was a failure that automatically recovered. All hardware needs to be replaced eventually and sometimes the timing just happens to line up.

For reference, there are a number of reasons why you might run into this:

• Planned maintenance: Azure periodically performs updates and while some can be performed in the background, others require a reboot. (Planned maintenance) (How to schedule maintenance)
• Host server fault: These are usually caused by hardware failures like a hard disk or solid-state drive failure. Normally the VM is available again within 5 minutes on the same host although sometimes manually redeploying the VM to another host server is helpful.
• VM crashes: There could be an issue with the VM itself. To troubleshoot these, view the system and application logs for Windows VMs and the serial logs for Linux VMs.
• Storage-related forced shutdowns: Whenever the availability or connectivity between the VM and the associated virtual disk is affected for more than 2 minutes, Azure performs a forced shutdown to avoid data corruption.
• Outages: Although rare, you can check the Azure Service Health dashboard and the Azure portal for the status of ongoing outages and past incidents.

If you need to do additional investigation on this VM, please let us know and we'll do our best to help.

Additional reading:
Microsoft Learn: Understand a system reboot for Azure VM