An organization has deployed a series of Azure Virtual Machines for a project. To reduce costs when the virtual machines are not in use, an administrator shuts down the guest operating system of a virtual machine from inside the operating system's shutdown menu. You need to determine the billing status of the compute resources. Is the statement that Azure stops billing for the virtual machine's compute resources when the guest operating system is shut down from within the virtual machine true or false?
Answer: Answer
Answer
The statement is false. Shutting down the guest operating system of an Azure Virtual Machine from within the operating system does not stop compute charges. The virtual machine must be stopped via the Azure Portal or command-line tools to be deallocated and stop compute charges.
The correct answer is false. When an Azure Virtual Machine is shut down from within the guest operating system, it changes to the 'Stopped' state. Because the underlying physical hardware resources remain reserved, compute billing continues. Compute charges only cease when the virtual machine is stopped using Azure management tools (such as the Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or Azure PowerShell), which deallocates the hardware and transitions the state to 'Stopped (deallocated)'.
Step-by-Step Solution
Key Concept
Azure Virtual Machine states and billing implications