Does Stop-AzVM do a graceful shutdown or not?

Question

I have several VMs that I'm using Stop-AZVM to shut down and deprovision at night to save resources and money. Recently I've had a few that did not come back online the next morning with a fatal patch error (fatal error C0000034 applying update.) I'm suspicious that the Stop-AZVM is not doing a graceful shutdown which is causing patch corruption when we turn the VMs on the next day.

How do shutdown my VMs and deallocate them at night while at the same time ensure they have a chance to wrap up any pre-shutdown patching work required?

Answer 1

Hi @Pete Horvath (Admin) ,

Stop-AzVM will do/try a graceful shutdown if you don't use the -SkipShutdown parameter:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.compute/stop-azvm?view=azps-8.2.0 -> See description of the -SkipShutdown` parameter here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/az.compute/stop-azvm?view=azps-8.2.0#parameters

A few days ago I ran in the error C0000034 issue on VM as well because the update was still running during shutdown or start phase of the VM and a Stop-AzVM was triggered.
But I was able to fix the error C0000034 issue and decided to do the Windows Updates manually in the future ;-)

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Regards
Andreas Baumgarten