VM power states

If you manage any number of Azure VMs on a day-to-day basis, you are going to need to understand the different states in which VMs can exist. In this section, I want to briefly touch on the available power states for a VM, and on how to check the current power state of a VMe via PowerShell.

There are seven power states that a VM can exist in:

• Starting: Indicates that the VM is being started.
• Running: Indicates that the VM is running.
• Stopping: Indicates that the VM is being stopped.
• Stopped: Indicates that the VM is stopped. Note that VMs in the stopped state still incur compute charges.
• Deallocating: Indicates that the VM is being deallocated.
• Deallocated: Indicates that the VM is completely removed from the hypervisor but still available in the control plane. VMs in the deallocated state do not incur compute charges.
• Unknown ( - ): Indicates that the power state of the VM is unknown.

Although most of these are self-explanatory, I wanted to ensure that you were aware of them.

Retrieving the VM's status

Retrieving the status of a VM is rather straightforward. To retrieve the state of a specific virtual machine, use the Get-AzureRmVM command, taking care to specify valid names for the VM and the resource group.

Run the following command to check the status of the myVM virtual machine:

Get-AzureRmVM `
 -ResourceGroupName "VMLab" `
 -Name "myVM" `
 -Status

The command in the preceding example retrieves the current status of the myVM virtual machine. While the output will include quite a bit of information, what we are most concerned about for this exercise is the part that shows whether the VM is running:

The resulting output indicates the current status of the VM.