Managing Azure Virtual Machines through the Portal could be pretty straightforward. But, it requires multiple steps using the GUI. For example, you’ll have to login to the Portal first, then go to the Azure Virtual Machines service, select the VMs, and then you can start, stop, restart, or even delete the virtual machines. There is also a quicker way to do these operations, especially if you are the SysOps/DevOps guy.
Although, there are three other ways to manage Azure VMs, including PowerShell cmdlets, ARM templates and the Azure CLI, today I’ll focus on the CLI.
Prerequisites
- Azure subscription
- Azure VMs
List Azure VM using the CLI
Step 1. Open Terminal and login to the Azure Portal.
az login
It will open a new window using the default browser, where you will be prompted for email and password.
Step 2. Now, we need the list of Azure Virtual machines IDs.
az vm list --query "[].id" --output tsv
Output:
/subscription/<SUBSCRIPTION_ID>/resourceGroups/AZURE-VMS-RG/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/web-server-1
/subscription/<SUBSCRIPTION_ID>/resourceGroups/AZURE-VMS-RG/providers/Microsoft.Compute/virtualMachines/web-server-2
Start Azure VMs
Step 3. Start a single Azure VM instance.
az vm start --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --name "<name_of_vm_instance>"
Step 4. Start all Azure VM instances.
az vm start --ids $(az vm list --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --query "[].id" --output tsv)
Stop Azure VMs
Step 5. Stop a single Azure VM instance.
az vm stop --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --name "<name_of_vm_instance>"
Step 6. Stop all Azure VM instances.
az vm stop --ids $(az vm list --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --query "[].id" --output tsv)
Note(s): Stopping a virtual machine will still generate costs, because you are holding on the VM’s resources, like: CPU, Memory, Disk, and so on. You could save money by deallocation, using the az vm deallocate command.
Step 7. Deallocate a single VM.
az vm deallocate --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --name "<name_of_vm_instance>"
Step 8. Deallocate all VMs.
az vm deallocate --ids $(az vm list --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --query "[].id" --output tsv)
Restart Azure VMs
Step 9. Restart a single Azure VM instance.
az vm restart --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --name "<name_of_vm_instance>"
Step 10. Restart all Azure VM instances.
az vm restart --ids $(az vm list --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --query "[].id" --output tsv)
Delete Azure VMs
Step 11. Delete a single Azure VM instance.
az vm delete --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --name "<name_of_vm_instance>"
Step 12. Delete all Azure VM instances.
az vm delete --ids $(az vm list --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --query "[].id" --output tsv)
Also, there is a way, if you want to manage a couple of virtual machines, by filtering the results using the pipe character | and the grep command. For example, if I want to delete VMs that include the “dev” string, I’ll execute something like this:
az vm delete --ids $(az vm list --resource-group "azure-vms-rg" --query "[].id" --output tsv) | grep "dev"
It goes the same for start, stop, restart and deallocate operations.
Conclusion
Managing Azure Virtual Machines through the Azure CLI could save you a lot of time, and you’ll be more productive. But, you should always be careful when executing these commands, especially when running the delete command. Feel free to leave a comment below and if you find this tutorial useful, follow our official channel on Telegram.