Failed to start virtual machine. I am getting this error when trying to start a VM.

Question

I have several VM in my pay-as-you-go subscription but I am having problem with the Azure VM with Windows 11.
Other VM's in my subscription doesn't have any issues and the VM having problem and other VM are also in same region. There is no any problem listed in Azure Health, everything looks heaththy.

I created a Windows 11 VM from a portal and it created successfully. I used Azure Spot Instance. The VM works fine when I try to start it for the first time but if i stop /deallocate the VM and try to start it again, it gives me following error :
Failed to start virtual machine 'win11-rajesh'. Error: Start operation is not allowed on Virtual Machine. Please check the error details.

I deleted the VM and created same windows 11 VM from a Disk , it worked fine for first time but started showing same issues from the second time.
I have made sure the Azure Spot price is good.
I also tried re-sizing the VM but no luck.
Redeploy doesn't work since it's in stop state but i tried reapply.

I have Microsoft 365 E5 Developer (without Windows and Audio Conferencing) license. Also when creating the VM i am checking the box that says "I confirm I have an eligible Windows 10 license with multi-tenant hosting rights."

is this what causing the issue ? Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Raw

Answer 1

Hi @rawzace ,

If you're receiving an 'Error: Start operation is not allowed on Virtual Machine.' on a Spot Virtual Machine, then it might not be due to it being Windows 11, but that there may be no Spot instances available after you restart. Spot Error Codes can be found here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/error-codes-spot

Even if 'Max Price' is set to '-1', the instance can still be denied deployment if there is no capacity for that Size and Location.

Were there any actions made to the image before Deallocation, like Generalizing the Image? If so then it won't be able to deploy the instance after Generalization.

Be sure to review the full Details of the error to determine the cause, this can be checked in Notifications, or the VM's Activity Log.

Answer 2

The issue was with the Azure Spo pricing. Thank you for your help. I was able to see the error in Azure Activity log.

Answer 3

Also if you want to try Azure cli to start the VM you get a clear error message that the spot pricing is the issue