I was using the free evaluation of Windows Azure Virtual Machines to see if my company could switch from our local cloud service providers to a Windows Azure. Today I've exceeded the usage limit (forgot to stop/delete one spurious VM created for testing only). The main VM was disconnected and its disk stored in storage account (which didn't exceeded the limit, as this is, after all, a test and usage is very low). Since I need the disk, and most importantly, the data inside it as it has performance information and even some production data that should never have ended up on that test VM, but... anyway, I'm not being able to:
1) Reuse the old DNS. Even the VM being removed, when I try to create a new one and select the old DNS it tells me the old DNS is already in use (xpihomo.cloudapp.net)
2) I can't create a virtual machine, it keeps getting me errors like this: "The server encountered an internal error. Please retry the request. The long running operation tracking ID was: 9439ecfa765c4d6d94bd9238a6e579a1."
UPDATE 2: I've deleted the Cloud Services, now I can reuse the DNS, but I still can't recreate the VM. It now gives this error: A lease conflict occurred with the blob https://portalvhds4bqgghbw63gp9.blob.core.windows.net/vhds/lucasoft-eval-eval-vm-2012-10-25.vhd. The long running operation tracking ID was: 97c64baeebce4c2d8e4a3c9661ef0130.
I'm also very disappointed that I only have a forum to ask for guidance and support. And can't imagine how I would proceed if this issue involved sensitive information? Post it on a forum for everyone to see?
And even worse: the forum software insists on using pt-br as its locale (I'm from Brazil) and in the pt-br forums there is no Virtual Machine Preview dedicated forum! I've posted this same message there but I'm not hoping to get any answers.
Does anyone know what may be going on that is preventing the VM creation?
And, as an extra question, does anyone know if Amazon services suffer from the same (lack of) support issues?
UPDATE: I've found an answer for (1):
When the VM instance is deleted the Cloud Service used to run it is not deleted automatically, and it keeps a hold on the DNS. If you want to reuse the same DNS you'll have to delete the cloud service entry... But would it delete the data from my VM? I don't think so, as it is stored in a separate VHD, but I just can't take the risk right now of deleting it...
I was able to resolve this issue by a very dirty, dirty route. Since it seemed that a lease conflict was preventing the VM from being mounted (certainly a bug in Azure's VM implementation) I've resorted to downloading a tool to manage the storage account and then I've copied the pertinent disk to another image and it worked. Here are the steps taken:
Needless to say that this was a bug in Microsoft Azure: they've kept a lease to a disk that was not used anymore.
The workaround works, but it certainly is a stain on the name of Windows Azure and its reliability and support team.