Cost Optimization for General Purpose VMs using Hibernation now Generally Available

During Microsoft Ignite 2023, we previewed the ability to hibernate VMs, making it easier for customers to save Compute costs. Hibernating a VM deallocates the machine while persisting the VM’s in-memory state. While the VM is hibernated, customers don’t pay for the Compute costs associated with the VM and only pay for storage and networking resources associated with the VM. Customers can later start back these VMs when needed and all their apps and processes that were previously running simply resume from their last state.

Today we are excited to announce that hibernation for general-purpose VMs is now generally available. In addition, customers can now use hibernation with new VM deployments as well as their existing VMs and save more costs.

Use cases

Hibernating VMs is an effective cost management feature for scenarios such as: 

• Virtual desktops, dev/test - customers can hibernate their machines after business hours and resume their machines the next morning without needing to reopen their apps.
• Prewarmed VMs - customers running VMs with apps that have long initialization times due to the memory components, can bring up the apps and hibernate the VMs. Later, these “prewarmed” VMs can be quickly started when needed, with the applications up and running in the desired state.

Customer and Partner testimonials

Several customers and partners used hibernation during preview and shared their feedback.

“We use Azure Virtual Desktop where we used to stop VMs outside working hours. Therefore, when starting work the next day, it was inefficient as we needed to manually start the applications and remember the state of the previous day's work. However, with the introduction of the hibernation feature, we can now start work while retaining the desktop state from the previous day, greatly improving efficiency. This allows for a balance between cost and convenience. NEC has been using hibernation during preview, and I myself have been using it and experiencing its benefits. With the feature being generally available, we are considering incorporating it into the overall power management system, and anticipate more benefits. Therefore, we plan to apply it to 90,000 single-session AVDs within NEC.” – Oguchi Kazuhiro (小口　和弘) - Executive Professional, ITSM - NEC Corporation.

“As part of our goal to optimize power consumption and costs for our customers, and as a long-time Azure partner providing global virtual desktops to Global 2000 enterprises around the world, Workspot is excited to offer VM hibernation capabilities to our customers, immediately. As part of the preview team, Workspot has worked closely with Microsoft to deliver the ability to hibernate and then resume virtual desktops, saving our joint customers the associated costs in Compute resources while they are away. Workspot delivers this hibernation capability in a seamless manner with no interaction needed by the end-user.” – Jimmy Chang, Chief Product Officer, Workspot.

Getting started with Hibernation

Hibernation is generally available for general purpose Intel and AMD VM sizes. Both Linux and Windows Operating Systems are supported. Hibernation for GPU VM sizes is in public preview.

Hibernation is available in all public regions. You can get started with hibernation using Azure Portal, PowerShell, CLI, ARM, SDKs, and APIs. For more details on how to get started with hibernation, refer to the product documentation.

In addition, customers using Azure Virtual Desktop, Citrix DaaS and Workspot on Azure can take advantage of hibernation today and further optimize costs.