Updated — 25/09/2024 — Please upgrade to PowerShell 7.4 by November 8, 2024, to avoid potential service disruptions or security vulnerabilities in your Functions apps.
Updated — 07/02/2024 — Adding a schedule to automate auto stop and start for Azure VMs during the weekend.
Updated — 16/09/2022 — Please upgrade to PowerShell 7.2 by December 3, 2022, to avoid potential service disruptions or security vulnerabilities in your Functions apps.
Cost management is one of the things to watch out for when managing Azure resources. If you look at the Azure usage report, Azure virtual machine usage would probably be the highest cost contributor to your bill.
As cost management, the best practice is to assess whether your virtual machines need to be up and running always or if some can be stopped at a specific schedule to save operational costs. In this case, it may be beneficial to create a schedule to stop and start your Azure virtual machines.
In this article, you will learn how to create an Azure Function where you can automate and schedule the start and stop of your Azure virtual machines using Tags and save costs.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Auto-Shutdown Azure VMs by schedule is already a built-in feature in the platform which you can find under the Operations section as shown in the figure below, however, Azure does not have an AutoStart option.
The good news is, that Azure provides multiple options to automate and schedule the startup of your virtual machines, and each option has its pros and cons. I will list the different options below so you can decide which option makes sense for you, is scalable, easy to manage, and is cheaper.
Azure Automation
Azure Automation delivers a cloud-based automation and configuration service that supports consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. It comprises process automation, configuration management, update management, shared capabilities, and heterogeneous features. Automation gives you complete control during deployment, operations, and decommissioning of workloads and resources. To automate the schedule of your virtual machines, you create first an automation account and then follow the steps described in this article.
Automation Tasks (preview)
Microsoft recently announced that you can manage your Azure resources more easily, where you can create automated management tasks for a specific resource or resource group by using automation task templates, which vary in availability based on the resource type. For example, for an Azure storage account, you can set up an automation task that sends you the monthly cost for that storage account. For an Azure virtual machine, you can create an automation task that turns on or turns off that virtual machine on a predefined schedule, you can follow the steps shown in this video by my dear friend Thomas Maurer.
At the time of this writing, the automation tasks option is in preview, it’s not recommended for production workloads, and is excluded from service-level agreements.
Azure Functions (the topic of this article)
With Azure Functions, you can develop more efficiently, an event-driven serverless compute platform that can also solve complex orchestration problems. You can build and debug locally without additional setup, deploy and operate at scale in the cloud, and integrate services using triggers and bindings.
You can read more about Azure Functions here.
How do Automation tasks differ from Azure Automation and Azure Functions?
Automation tasks and Azure Functions are more basic and lightweight than Azure Automation. Currently, you can create an automation task only at the Azure resource level. Behind the scenes, an automation task is a logic app resource that runs a workflow and is powered by the multi-tenant Azure Logic Apps service. To use Automation tasks, you need to have an Office 365 account to connect, however, this is not the case with Azure Functions and Azure Automation.
By comparison, Azure Automation is a cloud-based automation and configuration service that supports consistent management across your Azure and non-Azure environments. The service comprises process automation for orchestrating processes by using Runbooks, configuration management with change tracking and inventory, update management for your virtual machines, shared capabilities, and heterogeneous features. An automation account gives you complete control during deployment, operations, and decommissioning of workloads and resources.
In terms of scalability, Azure Functions is more scalable than the Automation task which is configured individually at the Azure resource level that you want to automate, and if you have different schedules that you want to trigger based on, then Azure Automation is not scalable too. With Functions, you write only the code once that truly matters to your business and scale faster.
On the pricing side, I would say that the price for Azure Functions is the cheapest option than using Automation tasks or Azure Automation. The functions app is cheaper when compared to the logic app which is the automation engine behind Automation tasks. When comparing Logic Apps and Azure Functions, both can run under a consumption plan. That means both have a pay-per-usage billing model. I will suggest using the pricing calculator here to compare what would be cheaper between the two options. But if you have high resource utilization then the function will be cheaper than a logic app. Please review the serverless comparison here.
The winner is Azure Functions in terms of scalability, easy to manage for a large number of resources, and cheaper… Read on!
Prerequisites
To follow this article, you need to have the following:
1) Azure subscription – If you don’t have an Azure subscription, you can create a free one here.
2) Azure Resource Group (RG).
3) Function App with App Service plan consumption-based (more on this in the next section).
4) Enable system-assigned managed identity for the Function App and assign the right permissions on the desired subscription(s) or management group(s) (more on this in the next section).
5) At least one Azure virtual machine is deployed in the desired RG. Please check the following quickstart guide to create a Linux or Windows virtual machine.
- Set the appropriate Tag name and Tag value on the target virtual machine that you want to schedule for auto-shutdown and auto-start (more on this in the next section).
Assuming you have all the prerequisites in place, take now the following steps:
Create Function App
In this section, we’ll create a new function app.
Browse to the Azure Portal and then click Create a resource, and select Function App.
Select your desired subscription, and resource group, and give it a nice name, such as “stop-start-azvm“.
The runtime stack means what language we would like to write the Function logic. Azure Function provides support for mainstream languages or platforms such as .NET, Java, Node.js, Python, Custom Handler, and PowerShell Core.
For this scenario, we need to choose PowerShell Core, as shown in the figure below. At the time of this writing, we can only choose version 7.4, the latest version.
Updated – 27/07/2022 – Please use PowerShell version 7.2 (latest) instead of 7.0. To avoid potential service disruptions or security vulnerabilities in your Functions apps, please upgrade to PowerShell 7.2 by December 3, 2022.
Updated – 24/09/2024 – Please use PowerShell version 7.4 (latest) instead of 7.2. To avoid potential service disruptions or security vulnerabilities in your Functions apps, please upgrade to PowerShell 7.4 by November 8, 2024.
Choose your desired Azure region, and then click Next: Hosting > to continue.
Next, we have to create a new or select an existing Storage account, which is required by the latest version of Azure Function V3.
For Plan type, select ‘Consumption‘ for serverless and event-driven scaling for the lowest minimum cost, this Plan is billed dynamically according to your usage, which helps save money when the usage is small as in this case.
As a side note, the ‘Premium‘ is for enterprise-level, serverless applications with event-based scaling and network isolation, and the ‘App Service Plan‘ is for reusing compute from the existing app service plan.
Click Next: Monitoring > to continue.
On the Monitoring tab, Application Insights can be used to monitor the running health of the function, and can also be used as a console output capture when debugging the function. It’s up to you to decide whether to enable it or not. It’s strongly recommended to Enable Application Insights, so you can test your function in the Azure portal and monitor it.
Click Review + Create > to review your input, and then select Create.
After the creation is completed, we need to configure permissions for this Function App to access our virtual machines, which could be deployed across multiple subscriptions.
Open your Function App, and then select Identity under the Settings menu, turn on the System assigned to toggle to On, then click Save as shown in the figure below, and then confirm by selecting Yes.
Once the system-assigned managed identity is enabled, the Function App resource will be registered with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). After it’s registered, we can control its access to other services like storage accounts, subscriptions, management groups, etc.
Now depending on the scope and coverage, you want to give access to the Function App to stop and start your virtual machines. You can give access to a single VM, resource group(s), subscription(s), or management group(s).
In this example, we will give access to the root management group where all our subscriptions are organized. You need to select your desired scope, then go to Access Control (IAM), select Role Assignments, and then Click + Add | Add role assignment.
Under “Assign access to” choose Function App, search for the Function App name we just created, then add it as a “Virtual Machine Contributor” role as shown in the figure below, and then click Save. The Virtual Machine Contributor role has enough privilege to stop and start the virtual machines.
Please note that we need to give that Function App to stop and start VM permission only and not more, please do not give an Owner or Contributor role. Always make sure to follow the principle of the least privilege.
Updated – 18/08/2023 – Please make sure to update your Function application to the Functions 4.x runtime for continued support. You can do that by going to Configuration under Settings | Function runtime settings | Runtime version ~4.
Function Code and Trigger
Now we have our Function App up and running, let’s create a new Function.
From the Functions blade under Functions, select + Create to create a Function as shown in the figure below.
Next, select “Time trigger” as shown in the figure below, and then click Create.
After the function is created, go to Integration and then select Time (Timer) under Trigger as shown in the figure below.
Next, enter the timing logic’s CRON expression in the “Schedule” field, as shown in the figure below.
0 0 * * * 1-6Take 0 0 * * * 1-6 as an example. This means that the function will trigger from Monday to Saturday, every hour (hourly). Click Save.
You need to enter a CRON expression of the format ‘{second} {minute} {hour} {day} {month} {day of week}’ to specify the schedule.
As a reference, here is the basic format of the CRON expressions in Azure Functions:
{second} {minute} {hour} {day} {month} {day of the week}
e.g. 0 * * * * * (is equal to every minute).
The following values are allowed for the different placeholders:
| Value | Allowed Values | Description |
|---|---|---|
| {second} | 0-59; * | {second} when the trigger will be fired |
| {minute} | 0-59; * | {minute} when the trigger will be fired |
| {hour} | 0-23; * | {hour} when the trigger will be fired |
| {day} | 1-31; * | {day} when the trigger will be fired |
| {month} | 1-12; * | {month} when the trigger will be fired |
| {day of the week} | 0-6; SUN-SAT; * | {day of the week} when the trigger will be fired |
For more information about Azure Functions time trigger, please refer to the official documentation here.
Please keep in mind that the trigger executes at UTC time. So for Bern (UTC+1), a trigger at 18:00 (UTC) executes at 19:00 Switzerland (UTC+1) wintertime and 20:00 (UTC+2) summertime. You will see later in the PowerShell code how we convert the UTC time zone to make sure that we AutoShutdown and AutoStart the VM based on “West Europe Standard Time” and not UTC.
Next, go to Code + Test of the function, and replace the default PowerShell code for run.ps1 with the below code. Please make sure to replace the $subscriptionids variable values with your Azure subscription(s) information.
# Input bindings are passed in via param block.
param($Timer)
# Add all your Azure Subscription Ids below
$subscriptionids = @"
[
"aaaaaaaa-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"bbbbbbbb-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"cccccccc-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"dddddddd-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"eeeeeeee-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"ffffffff-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"gggggggg-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"hhhhhhhh-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"iiiiiiii-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"jjjjjjjj-1234-5678-0000-999999999999"
]
"@ | ConvertFrom-Json
# Convert UTC to West Europe Standard Time zone
# If you live in a different Time zone, please make sure to update the $date variable below
# Check > https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/default-time-zones?view=windows-11#time-zones
$date = [System.TimeZoneInfo]::ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId([DateTime]::Now,"W. Europe Standard Time")
foreach ($subscriptionid in $subscriptionids) {
# Selecting Azure Sub
Set-AzContext -SubscriptionId $SubscriptionID | Out-Null
$CurrentSub = (Get-AzContext).Subscription.Id
If ($CurrentSub -ne $SubscriptionID) {
Throw "Could not switch to SubscriptionID: $SubscriptionID"
}
$vms = Get-AzVM -Status | Where-Object {($_.tags.AutoShutdown -ne $null) -and ($_.tags.AutoStart -ne $null)}
$now = $date
foreach ($vm in $vms) {
if (($vm.PowerState -eq 'VM running') -and ($now -gt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoShutdown))) ) {
Stop-AzVM -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -Confirm:$false -NoWait -Force
Write-Warning "Stop VM - $($vm.Name)"
}
elseif (($vm.PowerState -eq 'VM deallocated') -and ($now -gt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoStart))) -and ($now -lt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoShutdown))) ) {
Start-AzVM -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -NoWait
Write-Warning "Start VM - $($vm.Name)"
}
}
}Although param($Timer) in the script above is not used in the code logic, however, it cannot be deleted. This is a required parameter of the Timer Trigger.
The Set-AzContext, Get-AzVM, Start-AzVM, and Stop-AzVM cmdlets are not PowerShell modules, they are from the Azure (Az) PowerShell module. Since Azure PowerShell is already installed on the Function host, those commands can be used directly (more on this in a bit).
Click Save to save your code.
Now before we test our code, we need to enable the Az PowerShell module on the Function App under the App Service Editor.
From the Functions blade under Development Tools, select App Service Editor (Preview), and then click on Go-> as shown in the figure below.
A new browser tab will open where you can edit the requirements for the Function host.
As shown in the figure below, select requirements.psd1 and uncomment the ‘Az’ = ‘6.*’ on line number 7. This is a very important step. Otherwise, the function won’t be able to use the Az module, and thus, the PowerShell code will fail to run.
Updated – 18/08/2023 – Please make sure to use the ‘Az’ = ‘9.*’ OR ‘Az’ = ’10.*’ on line number 7 and NOT the ‘Az’ = ‘6.*’ anymore.
Updated – 25/09/2024 – Please make sure to use the ‘Az’ = ’11.*’ OR ‘Az’ = ’12.*’ on line number 7 and NOT the ‘Az’ = ’10.*’ anymore. Additionally, reducing the number of modules installed to only what you need is appropriate. So, in this example, we need only the “Az.Accounts” and the “Az.Compute” modules. You can add the following two modules to the requirements.psd1 file, as follows. We recommend not importing all of the Az modules ‘Az’ = ’12.*’ as it will increase performance on cold starts.
@{
# For latest supported version, go to 'https://www.powershellgallery.com/packages/Az'.
# To use the Az module in your function app, please uncomment the line below.
'Az.Accounts' = '3.*' # Latest module as of 25.09.2024
'Az.Compute' = '8.*' # Latest module as of 25.09.2024
}
The next update that you want to make is to select the host.json, and then increase the default function timeout to 10 minutes, as shown in the figure below. This is the maximum you are allowed for the Consumption Plan. This will help prevent the function from timing out after the default 5 minutes.
{
"version": "2.0",
"managedDependency": {
"enabled": true
},
"extensionBundle": {
"id": "Microsoft.Azure.Functions.ExtensionBundle",
"version": "[4.*, 5.0.0)"
},
"functionTimeout": "00:10:00"
}
Close the App Service Editor tab.
Set Tags for Azure VMs
The final step is to set the Tag names and Tag values on the desired virtual machine(s) that you want to schedule for AutoShutdown and AutoStart.
There are multiple ways to set and create tags for your Azure resources. In this example, I will show you two options by using the Azure Portal and the Azure PowerShell.
Navigate to your virtual machine in the Azure Portal, on the Overview page, select (change) next to Tags.
As shown in the figure below, enter the Tag names and adjust the value(s) based on your desired schedule.
Please make sure the Tag names are entered correctly (AutoShutdown and AutoStart), they are case-sensitive, otherwise, the function won’t work.
In this example, the AutoShutdown is set to 20:00 at night, and AutoStart is set to 07:00 in the morning.
The good news is, based on the values set on the tags, the Function will automate the stop and start for the VM.
Please note that you can have different values (times) on different virtual machines, and since the function will trigger hourly, it will stop and start the VM based on the values you enter here.
What about if you want to stop and start the VM at half past the hour? In this case, we need to decrease the time trigger and run the function every 30 minutes instead of every hour.
Now if you have many VMs you want to automate this process, we could use Azure PowerShell to tag our VMs.
Assuming you already have some Tags assigned on your Azure virtual machines, the PowerShell commands below will only add additional tags called AutoShutdown and AutoStart with their respective values “20:00” and “07:00”. For the VMs variable, please replace the “rgname“, and “vmname” with your Azure information.
$vms = @"
[
{
"rgname": "resource-group1",
"vmname": "vm1"
},
{
"rgname": "resource-group2",
"vmname": "vm2"
},
{
"rgname": "resource-group3",
"vmname": "vm3"
}
]
"@ | ConvertFrom-Json
foreach ($vm in $vms) {
$tags = (Get-AzResource -ResourceGroupName $vm.rgname -Name $vm.vmname).Tags
$tags += @{ AutoShutdown = "20:00"; AutoStart = "07:00" }
Set-AzResource -ResourceGroupName $vm.rgname -Name $vm.vmname -ResourceType "Microsoft.Compute/VirtualMachines" -Tag $tags
}If you want to tag a virtual machine using the Azure CLI, please see how to tag a virtual machine in Azure using the Azure CLI.
Automate Schedule During the Weekend
Another interesting scenario is to schedule the auto stop and start for Azure VMs during the weekend. In other words, some VM resources should not start during the weekend and remain off, while others must be started and available during the weekend.
To make this happen, we need to add another Tag to specify if the VM should be On or Off during the weekend.
As shown in the figure below, enter the Tag names and adjust the value(s) based on your desired schedule and weekend preference. Please make sure the Tag names are entered correctly (AutoShutdown / AutoStart / Weekend), otherwise, the function won’t work.
In this example, the AutoShutdown is set to 19:00, the AutoStart is set to 07:00 in the morning, and the Weekend is ‘Off‘.
If you want the VM to be on during the weekend, then make sure to set the value to ‘On‘ for the Tag ‘Weekend‘.
Next is to use the following PowerShell code in your Azure function under the run.ps1 section that will automate this scenario:
# Input bindings are passed in via param block.
param($Timer)
# Add all your Azure Subscription Ids below
$subscriptionids = @"
[
"aaaaaaaa-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"bbbbbbbb-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"cccccccc-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"dddddddd-1234-5678-0000-999999999999",
"eeeeeeee-1234-5678-0000-999999999999"
]
"@ | ConvertFrom-Json
# Convert UTC to West Europe Standard Time zone
# If you live in a different Time zone, please make sure to update the $date variable below
# Check > https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/default-time-zones?view=windows-11#time-zones
$date = [System.TimeZoneInfo]::ConvertTimeBySystemTimeZoneId([DateTime]::Now, "W. Europe Standard Time")
foreach ($subscriptionid in $subscriptionids) {
# Selecting Azure Sub
Set-AzContext -SubscriptionId $SubscriptionID | Out-Null
$CurrentSub = (Get-AzContext).Subscription.Id
If ($CurrentSub -ne $SubscriptionID) {
Throw "Could not switch to SubscriptionID: $SubscriptionID"
}
$vms = Get-AzVM -Status | Where-Object { ($_.tags.AutoShutdown -ne $null) -and ($_.tags.AutoStart -ne $null) -and ($_.tags.Weekend -ne $null) }
$now = $date
foreach ($vm in $vms) {
if (($vm.PowerState -eq 'VM running') -and ($now -gt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoShutdown))) ) {
Stop-AzVM -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -Confirm:$false -NoWait -Force
Write-Warning "Stop VM - $($vm.Name)"
}
elseif (($vm.PowerState -eq 'VM deallocated') -and ($vm.tags.Weekend -eq 'Off') -and ($date.dayofweek.value__ -in 1..5) -and ($now -gt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoStart))) -and ($now -lt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoShutdown))) ) {
Start-AzVM -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -NoWait
Write-Warning "Start VM - $($vm.Name)"
}
elseif (($vm.PowerState -eq 'VM deallocated') -and ($vm.tags.Weekend -eq 'On') -and ($date.dayofweek.value__ -in 0..6) -and ($now -gt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoStart))) -and ($now -lt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoShutdown))) ) {
Start-AzVM -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -NoWait
Write-Warning "Start VM - $($vm.Name)"
}
}
}Please note that it’s important that the CRON expression for the trigger includes “Saturday” and “Sunday” for the Weekend tags to work. The CRON expression of the timing logic in the “schedule” field for the “function.json” is shown below:
"schedule": "0 0 * * * 0-6",This means that the function will trigger every hour (hourly) from Monday to Sunday, where 0 starts with Sunday through Saturday 6.
Test the Function Schedule
At this step, we are ready to test our function!
To test your function manually from the Azure portal, you need to set the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) in your Function App. Running your function in the portal requires the app to explicitly accept requests from https://portal.azure.com. This is known as cross-origin resource sharing (CORS).
In your Function App, under API, select CORS and then add the Allowed Origins below. This is only required to test the function manually in the Azure portal.
https://portal.azure.com
https://functions.azure.com
https://functions-staging.azure.com
https://functions-next.azure.com
Next, you need to change the tag values for AutoShutdown and AutoStart for a VM to a closer hour depending on what time you created the function app above.
Next, you can trigger the function manually by going to the Function App Overview page, then select your function under Functions, then going to Code + Test, clicking “Test/Run” and clicking Run. If everything is OK you should not see any error in the Logs console as shown in the figure below and now your VM should be stopped or started.
The next option is to simply wait for the next hour when the function will automatically trigger.
If you see any error in the output logs, then go to the Monitor section and check the errors in more detail (you must have Application Insights enabled for the monitoring to work).
If we look at the Activity log for the VM, we can see that schedule worked successfully and the VM was turned off at 20:00 and started at 07:00 in the morning. The event was automatically initiated by the Function App name.
That’s there you have it!
Summary
In this article, I showed you how to create an Azure Function so you can schedule the start and stop of your Azure virtual machines based on the defined Tag names and values. This will help you to save costs and you only pay for virtual machines when you’re running them.
With Azure Functions, you can build more scalable and stable event-driven applications with a microservices-friendly approach using Functions. Please refer to the pricing pages below for more details:
Logic App Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/logic-apps/
Function App Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/functions/
Azure Automation Pricing: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/automation/
As a monthly bonus for the consumption plan pricing, both Azure Functions and Logic Apps include a monthly free grant* (the First 4,000 actions are free for logic apps and 400,000 GB-s for functions).
*Free grants apply to paid, consumption subscriptions only. In that scenario, you can leverage the Azure function to automate and schedule the start and stop of your Azure virtual rather than using a logic app (automation tasks) if it is under the free limit.
__
Thank you for reading my blog.
If you have any questions or feedback, please leave a comment.
-Charbel Nemnom-
Thank you, Paris, after adding the functionTimeout it also worked for me.
I appreciate your feedback and help,
Marcus
The Function app gives no error, everything seems ok and it fires every hour as it should. However, the VMs does not shut down or start up. What could be wrong? Tags are set like “AutoShutdown” left and “10:00” right in the portal. The function app has Virtual machine Contributor rights on the subscription.
Hello Morten, thanks for the comment!
I am sorry, I cannot troubleshoot this issue here in the comment section.
There could be many reasons for this to happen.
You mentioned that you have deployed this at two customers and it’s working flawlessly at the first one.
I would say revise all the steps again and make sure the PowerShell code is correct.
If you are interested in working on this together, please feel free to reach out using this form.
Thanks!
I’m happy to report that it’s all working now. All I did (I think) was delete the tags on the VMs, and create them again, with AutoShutdown, not AutoShutDown… (no capital D in down). I don’t know if these are case-sensitive, or if it was the deletion and creation of the tags again that did the trick.
Thank you, Morten, for the update!
I am happy to hear that it’s working for you now.
Yes, AutoShutdown and AutoStart Tags are case-sensitive here.
I have already mentioned that in the Set Tags for Azure VMs section in the article.
Great article thank you.
I did find that the CRON expression days you have in the article should be
day of the week (0 – 6) (Sunday to Saturday)
Thank you, John, for the feedback and the note!
Yes, for days, the numeric values are 0 to 6 where 0 starts with Sunday.
I’ve updated the Table.
Hello Charbel!
Thank you so much for this! I was curious if you’ve run into any issues when someone needs to turn the VM on manually (let’s say for unexpected work outside of the schedule). I’m finding that if I do, it falls out of schedule and no longer applies. I just tried to remove the tags and re-test the function to hopefully get it back in sync, but odd considering it shouldn’t care about any manual activities.
Thank you!
Hello Maria, thanks for your feedback and your kind words!
I never faced the issue that you described. I have it deployed in many environments.
I just tried to Turn on the VM manually outside of the schedule, in this case, the next time the Function App triggers (i.e after 30 minutes or 1 hour), the Function will check the Tags and shut down the machine.
Removing and adding the Tags do not interfere with any manual activities that you do.
Thanks!
Hello Charbel,
Please ignore last post as the function app works great. I intend to use this app for auto starting WVDs only once a month over a weekend so they pickup required updates which I may achieve using proper ncron expression and I have another function app in place to auto deallocate wvds with zero active sessions. Just curious if there’s a way we can just use this apps with AutoStart tag without auto shutting down the VM.
Hello Shaaz, thanks for the comment and feedback!
I’ve noticed that you wrote different comments.
I understood what you want to achieve for AVD. Yes, this is totally possible and achievable.
But sorry, I cannot provide support for a particular use case in the comments here.
If you would like to work on this, you can reach out to me using this form.
Thank you for understanding!
Hello Charbel,
The script is for working well when I want to stop VM, but it doesn’t want to turn on.
Do you know what could be problem?
Hello Matej, thanks for the comment!
Sorry, I cannot help with the limited details that you shared here.
Do you see any error? Can you share the logs, please?
I cannot provide support in the comments section here.
If you would like to go deep on this, you can reach out to me using this form.
Thank you for understanding!
Hi Charbel,
Great post! I was wondering if you have tested these steps with a Linux VM? I have a combination of both and wanted to know before I start implementing this.
Hello Frank, thanks for the comment and feedback!
Yes, the same steps described in this guide will work on both Linux and Windows Azure VMs.
Hope it helps!
Ah! :) I was running it from the function object, not the trigger object. If I run it from the Trigger object then it sets things up properly. This might help others. :)
Hello SteveP, thank you for sharing your experience here!
Yes, you need to run it from the Trigger object and NOT as a function object.
This was clearly noted in the Test section of the Function.
Everything works fine except weekend schedule. Looks like some issue with the code mentioned below:
elseif (($vm.PowerState -eq 'VM deallocated') -and ($vm.tags.Weekend -eq 'On') -and ($now -gt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoStart))) -and ($now -lt $(get-date $($vm.tags.AutoShutdown))) ) { Start-AzVM -Name $vm.Name -ResourceGroupName $vm.ResourceGroupName -NoWait Write-Warning "Start VM - $($vm.Name)"}Hello Ayyappan, thanks for reporting this!
Do you mean that the VM is not starting during the Weekend?
I have updated the code for the weekend schedule when the ‘Weekend’ Tag value is set to ‘On’.
Could you please get the new code and try again?
You can find the last part of the code here:
Hope it helps!
Thank you for making this – I think there is still an issue with the weekend code
The first elseif checks for VM deallocated, weekend tag set to off, Today being Mon-Friday, and then the correct start timing.
The second elseif checks for VM deallocated, weekend tag set to on, Today being either Sat-Sun and then the correct start timing.
However there is no check for VM deallocated, with weekend tag set to on, and today being a weekday.
An adjustment would be the second elseif be $date.dayofweek.value__ -in 6..7 changing to $date.dayofweek.value__ -in 1..7
Here the first elseif block would turn on all in scope machines Monday to Friday with the Weekend tag off, and the second elseif block would turn on all in scope machines Monday to Sunday with the weekend tag on.
There maybe a more elegant adjustment – your coding skills are way above mine!