Reduce Compute Costs by Pausing VMs (now in public preview)

We are excited to announce that Azure is making it easier for customers to reduce Compute costs by providing them the ability to hibernate Virtual Machines (VMs). Starting today, customers can hibernate their VMs and resume them at a later time. 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.

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.
  
  

Hibernation availability in the broader ecosystem

In addition to previewing Hibernation for Azure VMs, we are excited to share that starting today customers can take advantage of this new capability through Azure Virtual Desktop and Citrix DaaS.

Azure Virtual Desktop

Azure Virtual Desktop provides a flexible cloud virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platform that securely delivers virtual desktops and remote apps. Azure Virtual Desktop’s Personal Desktop Autoscale capability (now generally available) offers customers a native scaling solution that automatically starts session host virtual machines based on schedules or via Start VM on Connect . It also deallocates session host machines based on the user session state (disconnect or log off), allowing users to save costs by shutting down idle session hosts.

Starting today, customers can also use hibernation (in preview) with Personal Desktop Autoscale and Start VM on Connect. Customers can configure their personal scaling plan to either hibernate or deallocate host machines. By choosing to hibernate machines, customers will be able to resume from right where they left off when the session starts again. Learn more about creating personal desktop scaling plan here.

Citrix Desktop as a Service (DaaS) for Azure

Microsoft and Citrix have been collaborating for decades to provide technology solutions that streamline IT operations and optimize costs. To meet the increasing needs for hybrid workplace, Citrix DaaS provides customers desktop and app virtualization solutions that leverage the Azure Virtual Desktop platform capabilities. This allows customers to maximize their existing investments and use the tools and solutions with which they are already familiar.

We are excited to share that Citrix DaaS now offers customers the ability to hibernate their VMs (in preview). Extending the cost saving capabilities of hibernation to Citrix DaaS allows Citrix customers to leverage the extensive benefits of hibernation for Azure VMs. Customers can choose to hibernate their VMs directly from the Citrix Studio or use Citrix’ Autoscale capability to automatically hibernate VMs after users disconnect or logoff.

Getting started with Hibernation on Azure

Hibernation is currently available for General Purpose Intel and AMD VM Sizes. Both Linux and Windows Operating Systems are supported. In the coming months we will be adding support for more VM sizes and more Linux distributions.

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.