Two shut down modes for Windows Azure VMS

Today when investigating the price of Azure, the following statement was found, from http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-machines/

* If My deployed instance is in the ' Stopped ' state, do I still get billed?

If your instance is in the Stopped deallocated state, it's not billed. If your instance is on the Stopped allocated state, it is still occupying compute resources and would be billed for virtual Cores allocated, not the software license itself.

This means that if your VM is in a stopped state, you will still be charged for CPU usage. And in the stopped deallocated state, completely free.

But there is no mention of how these two states can be achieved, tested and found

1. Stopped status: Telnet to VM, perform shut down operation, VM status will change to stop state

2. Stopped deallocated Status: Log in to Azure Portal, select the VM, and click the Shutdown button below. The VM will become stopped deallocated state

Note that after clicking the Shutdown button, the If you continue is prompted, the IP addresses that were assigned to this virtual machine would be released. Is you sure want to shut down virtual machine * * * * *?

This means that the IP address used by this VM will be released and a new address will be assigned to it when it is started again. DNS name does not change, so try not to use an IP address.

Amazon's AWS EC2 is a little bit better at this point, anyway shut down VMs are a state and will not be charged after shut down.

Microsoft's two shut down mode is not very likely to affect the server already on-line, because after the online basic will not shut down. It will only affect the development, testing phase, the overall problem is not big. But hopefully Microsoft will be able to improve and merge the shutdown state.