We have set up a small AZURE VM (plain windows 2012 R2 image as provided by Microsoft) with a lightweight DEMO application that happily runs with SQLExpress and 1GB RAM. This VM did run quite fine for a month. A few days ago we shut down the VM and the cloud service to save some credits until we need the demo again.
Today the VM refuses to start and cycles continuously between "stopped", "starting" and "stopped (could not start)".
No useful error detals are listed but the operation logs of the management service notes
<OperationStatus>
<ID>98502f34-08bd-70a3-b0c3-f7e08976dd38</ID>
<Status>Failed</Status>
<HttpStatusCode>500</HttpStatusCode>
<Error>
<Code>InternalError</Code>
<Message>The server encountered an internal error. Please retry the request.</Message>
</Error>
</OperationStatus>
Can i expect that this situation will eventually resolve by itself or is there any other measure I could try to get my VM up and running again? It is no option to download the 20GB virtual disk to examine it locally and upload it again. This would take forever and a day.
Are the AZURE services just crap?
If you haven't already tried it, a typical workaround step is to delete the failing VM (keeping the disk/stateful information intact!) and then recreate it using the same disk.