A "sleep" state of VM which is cost wise similar to stop state. The VM wakes up and continues the previous session without rebooting OS.
It is a great feature of Azure to stop costs if the VM is stopped. But shutdown the VM needs close all the running programs and applications in the current session. It will be great if the VM can have a sleep mode which can stop all the costs (or partially). So users can quickly resume the work in the new session without restarting the VM.


This is something that we are evaluating now for a future Azure update.
22 comments
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Udaya Bhaskar commented
It is time to bring this Handy cost-saving feature. It is high time demand.
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Anonymous commented
@noyb- Did you stop your vm and de-allocate it?
How would ms know if you are done or using your server? The only thing you would be charged for is storage if you did that.
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noyb commented
Just to clarify why I'm angry: I just realized I'v been charged more than $100 for what was essentially an application in halted development with close to zero use.
I assumed it would automatically hybernate and generate zero or close to zero charges.Not only a wrong assumption, but also no easy way to manually place the app service into stopped state. Sour taste indeed...
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noyb commented
I started believing in MicroSoft becoming a more customer-centered organization until I recently bumped into this issue. Unbelievable! And clearly motivated by greed rather than by concern for the customer. This should have been fixed years ago.
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Rajesh Mag commented
Any way to persist and restore to same memory state is fine, like Hibernate/Sleep.
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Kuntal Mehta commented
Please include that ASAP. It is must have and highly recommended feature and would make many developer's life easy who uses Azure as dev environment.
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Kalman commented
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Kalman commented
Azure, where is this feature? I have seen this request since 2013 and there are no good answers. Meanwhile, AWS and GCP offer this feature.
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Eric van der Voort commented
Just wondering if this feature request is still under review....
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Andrei Lefter commented
That will happen like never. Next thing lets do it for free :))
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Mike PB commented
Is this a duplicate of https://feedback.azure.com/forums/216843-virtual-machines/suggestions/13914840-ability-to-hibernate-vms-to-support-devtest-workfl#comments ? I have voted and commented there, but this feature is essential for migrating a developer machine to Azure.
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Anonymous commented
This would be beneficial for our Dev team, as we currently stop VM's on weekends when they are not in use, but it does require 15-45 minutes to get all our tools up running and open to where we were again on Monday morning.
Would be massively helpful to just come in with everything where it was pre-sleep.
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André Melancia [MCT] commented
All you need to do is allow hibernation in the system firmware for the VM, which should never have been disallowed in the first place.
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Bill commented
This is the only reason all of my development machines are still at Cloudshare. If Azure would put this feature in then we would switch.
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Paul commented
"Hibernate and deallocate" - I like the idea! In fact, I think resource allocation to stopped and hibernated servers should be optional on a per-VM basis, not mandatory. I've been burned by stopped/allocated machines, thinking I was not being charged, and it leaves a sour taste in the mouth...
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Anonymous commented
without that feature, how should a SharePoint developer work? Restart the machine every morning, then starting Visual Studio? It takes 10 minutes.
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Amethyste commented
Why not an integrated shutdown feature as well?
I would like to be able to flag a VM to a scheduler with a build-in task that shutdown/startup automatically the VMThis is a very common and generic task and so it's a shame to have to write a specific task just for that
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R. Lawson commented
Agree with this feature 1000% I want to get all developers on VMs in Azure. If they are billing clients, the cost is worth it. But if the VM is idle over half the time after hours - which it will be - we are paying twice the cost.
There are what I consider hacks to shut down on idle, but the hacks are intrusive, difficult for an administrator to setup, and not always reliable.
Please make this simple!
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che commented
For me the main issue is the speed at which I can take a sleeping or stopped VM and have it up and running and taking requests. If sleep lets me cut that time down to just a few seconds then it would be extremely valuable.
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Akash commented
Essentially Hibernate and deallocate