21 March 2020 Microsoft published an official "commitment to customers and Microsoft cloud services continuity", saying that they are prioritizing "first responders, health and emergency management services, critical government infrastructure organizational use". Fair enough, but what other people are supposed to do when they could not start their VMs?
Here are a few tips, unfortunately most of them will increase your total Azure bill:
- downsize your VM size to a minimum possible. This will help you to start more VMs and will release unused Azure resources for others.
- disable auto-shutdown for a mission-critical VMs, make them run 24x7 to make sure you have top priority server(s) up and running
- start your VM(s) early in the morning, most of the failed allocation reports seems to be coming after 8:30 CET+1
- retry when VM failed to start, however this may take quite some time
- resize a VM to a different CPU core pool. If you are using DSv2, try E, L, or F and vice versa. Core availability is different per Azure region and changing all the time, so you may or may not get lucky with finding another decent VM size
- create a new VM in a different Azure region. I was not able to get details from Azure Support regarding which Azure region is the least loaded. If you have such info - use that region for your advantage and free some resources for others in your current region :)
