What's the difference between hibernating and stopping a VM in Azure?
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TechieExplorer42
I'm setting up a personal Azure lab for some testing to boost my skills, but I have to manage my costs carefully since I don't have a budget from my employer, and I'm not a student. I need to understand the differences between a VM that can hibernate and one that uses spot pricing with the option to stop and deallocate. When I hibernate a VM, my understanding is that it saves the current state and releases CPU and RAM, only costing me for storage during hibernation—this also might take longer to start up later. On the other hand, when I choose to stop and deallocate, the VM is powered down, and I'm still charged for storage, but no CPU or RAM costs. I'm curious whether I can still restart a stopped VM without any worries, as at my work, stopped VMs are often deleted unless restored from a backup. I want to confirm if my understanding of stop and deallocate is correct so I can avoid any unexpected costs.
Answers
You're spot on! Hibernation depends on your VM's SKU and OS support. For a lab, consider whether you really need to keep the state. It might be a good idea to build your infrastructure using tools like Terraform or Bicep and destroy it when you're not using it. That way, you can keep things simpler and more cost-effective.
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PersonalLabBuilder99: Yeah, I’d like to learn Bicep too, but I don't want to work on this during my work hours or on my work PC. So, I’ll probably just set up the VMs and get everything ready during the night and work on it whenever I can. My main concern is with SQL Dev edition on my VMs; I'll need to shut down those services when I’m done for the day to prevent issues.