I've been using Azure VM hibernation as part of our setup with Azure Virtual Desktop, but we've hit some bumps lately due to a provisioning issue related to capacity in the CUS region for the Dasv5 series. While this is quite problematic for us, that's not the main point of this post.
From what I see, hibernation doesn't look like it's in preview nor has it been announced for deprecation, but it feels like it's been left unattended. Currently, only v5 series VM SKUs support this feature. Given that hibernation isn't a new or particularly exciting technology, I'm curious if it's likely to see any future improvements. Does anyone have thoughts, insights, or experiences to share?
3 Answers
I'm interested in your use case for hibernation! We've used Nerdio for scaling, but we always keep at least one machine running to avoid delays when users need to boot up. What advantage do you find in using hibernation instead?
It's wild how the capacity issues in US East have been persisting since around August. I found myself writing scripts to manually power on servers—effectively creating a scaling plan of my own because the built-in one just doesn't cut it. Lately, things have improved a bit in US East, but the service health issues are still ongoing.
I’m more focused on the state of hibernation too, though!
I haven't dealt with hibernation directly since most of my clients prefer to use scaling plans in Azure Virtual Desktop. Have you considered looking into capacity reservations? They might help with provisioning issues, although you still pay for compute resources even when VMs are off, which kind of defeats the purpose of turning them off in the first place.
Yeah, but what's up with only supporting v5? If I use capacity reservations, it kind of undermines the whole point of hibernation.
For us, the major advantage is that hibernation preserves the VM's state, which is crucial for our consultants and contractors. It helps avoid data loss and keeps the VMs ready for immediate use.