Exercise - Start and stop your VM with the Azure CLI

  • 5 minutes

One of the main tasks you'll want to do while running virtual machines is to start and stop them.

Note

This exercise is optional. If you want to complete this exercise, you'll need to create an Azure subscription before you begin. If you don't have an Azure account or you don't want to create one at this time, you can read through the instructions so you understand the information that's being presented.

Note

In this unit, you use Azure Cloud Shell as a terminal. You can access Cloud Shell through the Azure portal or the Cloud Shell sign-in. You don't have to install anything on your PC or laptop to use it.

Note

Throughout this exercise, replace myResourceGroupName in the examples with the name of an existing resource group, or the name of the resource group that you created for this exercise.

Stop a VM

We can stop a running VM with the vm stop command. You must pass the name and resource group or the unique ID for the VM:

az vm stop \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group "myResourceGroupName"

You can verify the VM has stopped by attempting to ping the public IP address, using ssh, or through the vm get-instance-view command. This final approach returns the same basic data as vm show, but includes details about the instance itself. Try entering the following command into Azure Cloud Shell to see the current running state of your VM:

az vm get-instance-view \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group "myResourceGroupName" \
    --query "instanceView.statuses[?starts_with(code, 'PowerState/')].displayStatus" -o tsv

This command should return VM stopped as the result.

Start a VM

We can do the reverse through the vm start command.

az vm start \
    --name SampleVM \
    --resource-group "myResourceGroupName"

This command starts a stopped VM. You can verify it through the vm get-instance-view query you used in the last section, which should now return VM running.

Restart a VM

Finally, we can restart a VM if we've made changes that require a reboot by running the vm restart command. You can add the --no-wait flag if you want the Azure CLI to return immediately without waiting for the VM to reboot.