How to save huge money by shutting down your VM automatically

Updated on 2018-03-14

Virtual machines (VM) are used in most solutions nowadays as a [ProcessName] server, temporary machine to run tests or make demos, and sometimes even as a development machine. One of the great benefits of the cloud is that you only pay for what you use. So unlike the old server, that you keep paying for, you won pay virtual machine's CPU for when you turned off! In this post, I explain how to do it with your existing machines and also what to do with all the future one that you will be creating.

(Ce billet en aussi disponible en français.)

Already have a VM up and running, here what to do


From the Azure portal (portal.azure.com), select the Virtual Machine (VM) that you which to edit. Then look at the option panel, on the left, for Auto-Shutdown in the Operations section. You should have something that looks like this:

auto-shutdown

At any time you can enable and disable that functionality, it won’t affect the running VM.

Now, to activate it click on the Enabled. Then Select the time you would like to see the VM shutdown. Be sure to select the good time zone, by default it’s UTC. You can adjust the at for UTC of change the time zone, both options are valid.

Now you could decide to enable the notification. That could be useful if you may want to postpone the shutdown for one or two hours, or integrate the shutdown to another process like backup, cleaning…

To activate the notification option just click on the enabled, and enter the email address. If you want to attach the shutdown to a Logic App or an Azure Functions use the webhook. Here an example of notification email, see the Postpone options link.

emailsample

What if you have many VMs running


Let's say you have already twenty (or more) VMs running, you could have executed a PowerShell script like:


$myMVsName = @("franDev1", "frankBuildserver", "demo_sales2018")

For ($i=0; $i -lt $myMVsName.Length; $i++) {     
    Set-AzureRmDtlAutoShutdownPolicy $myMVsName[$i]
    [...]
}

Update - 2018-03-14
Well, today this is only possible for VM part of a DevTest Labs. Not for "regular" VM. However, I'm sure that day will come pretty quick.Does that mean that you need to go in all your VMs and set it manually? No. You can use an Azure Automation that will stop a list of VM on a regular schedule. A big advantage of this solution is that you can be more creative since it offers a lot more flexibility. You could identify the VM to shutdown base on some TAGS, you could have a different schedule base on the week vs weekend. You could even have a task to start VMs in the morning... More to come on that topic in a future post... If you want to read about how to get started to Azure Automation click here.

Multiple VMs that already exist, no problem

Obviously, if you have multiple virtual machines that already exist it is not very efficient to change their configuration one by one via the portal. Here is a small script to change the configuration of a large amount of VM in one shot.


    '# Login-AzureRmAccount

    $Subscription = Get-AzureRmSubscription -SubscriptionName 'YOUR_SUBSCRIPTION_NAME'
    Select-AzureRmSubscription -Subscription $Subscription.Id

    $selectedVMs = Get-Azurermvm -ResourceGroupName cloud5mins
    foreach($vm in $selectedVMs) 
    { 
        $ResourceGroup = $vm.ResourceGroupName
        $vmName = $vm.Name
        $ScheduledShutdownResourceId = "/subscriptions/$Subscription/resourceGroups/$ResourceGroup/providers/microsoft.devtestlab/schedules/shutdown-computevm-$vmName"
    
        $Properties = @{}
        $Properties.Add('status', 'Enabled')
        $Properties.Add('targetResourceId', $vm.Id)
        $Properties.Add('taskType', 'ComputeVmShutdownTask')
        $Properties.Add('dailyRecurrence', @{'time'= 2100})
        $Properties.Add('timeZoneId', 'Eastern Standard Time')
        $Properties.Add('notificationSettings', @{status='Disabled'; timeInMinutes=60})

        New-AzureRmResource -Location $vm.Location -ResourceId $ScheduledShutdownResourceId -Properties $Properties -Force
    }


The variable $selectedVMs contains all the VMS that we wish to edit. In this sample, I only get VMs contained in the RessourceGroup cloud5mins, but there are no limits to what you can do. You could select all VMs with a specific OS, tags, location, name, etc.

The variable $ScheduledShutdownResourceId will be the identity for the configuration for the auto-shutdown we wish to inject. Note that the provider is microsoft.devtestlab.

Next, we create a collection of properties in $Properties. status the one that active or deactivate the auto-shutdonw. targetResourceId is the resourceID of the VM we target.

The only things left is to specify the time and timezone.

If you prefer, I also have a video version that explains all the steps.

How to shutdown automatically all your existing VMs



End Update

Let's create a VM with the auto-shutdown pre-configured with ARM


Of course, a much more efficient way to set the auto-shutdown is at the creation time by adding a new resource of type Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules to your template. This option was previously only accessible for DevTestLab, but recently was made available to any VMs.
Here an example of the variables that could be added to your template.

"variables": {

    "ShutdowTime": "21:00",
    "TimeZone": "UTC",
    "emailRecipient": "frank@frankysnotes.com",
    "notificationLocale": "en",
    "timeInMinutes": 30
}

And here an example of Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules resource. One of these should be added for every VM you wish to auto-shutdown. Because your script is for one server, however, only one instance is required.

{
    "name": "[concat('autoshutdown-', variables('vmName'))]",
    "type": "Microsoft.DevTestLab/schedules",
    "apiVersion": "2017-04-26-preview",
    "location": "[resourceGroup().location]",
    "properties": {
        "status": "Enabled",
        "taskType": "ComputeVmShutdownTask",
        "dailyRecurrence": {
            "time": "[variables('ShutdowTime')]"
        },
        "timeZoneId": "[variables('TimeZone')]",
        "targetResourceId": "[resourceId('Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines', variables('vmName'))]",
        "notificationSettings": {
            "status": "Enabled",
            "emailRecipient": "[variables('emailRecipient')]",
            "notificationLocale": "[variables('notificationLocale')]",
            "timeInMinutes": "[variables('timeInMinutes')]"
        }
    },
    "dependsOn": [
        "[concat('Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/', variables('vmName'))]"
    ]
}