In the ever-evolving landscape of cloud computing, cost efficiency remains a top priority for platform engineers and lab users. To help organizations optimize cloud costs and management, we’re excited to introduce the Hibernation feature for virtual machines (VMs) in Azure DevTest Labs, now in public preview.

The new Hibernation feature in Azure DevTest Labs helps optimize costs by pausing Virtual Machines (VMs) while preserving their state, making it easy to resume work without losing progress. Hibernation is an effective way to reduce costs and adds more flexibility to VM management.

Azure DevTest Labs has traditionally provided capabilities such as shutdown of Virtual Machine, either manually or through scheduling, to help users manage VM costs efficiently. While effective at reducing expenses, the shutdown feature doesn’t maintain the state of applications and processes between VM sessions. That’s where the new hibernation feature fills the gap — enabling VMs to pause while preserving their memory contents, so you can pick up right where you left off without reconfiguring or restarting.

When you hibernate a machine, Azure stores the memory contents of the VM in the OS disk and then deallocates the VM. When the VM is started again from its hibernated state, the memory contents are transferred from the OS disk back into memory. Once a VM is placed in a hibernated state, you aren’t charged for the compute cost of the VM, just like how you aren’t charged for it in a stopped (deallocated) state. You’re only charged for the storage (OS disk, data disks) and networking resources (IPs, etc.) attached to the VM.

Examples of Hibernation in Action

Hibernation can be useful when:

• VMs don’t need to run 24/7.
• You don’t want to lose the state of the applications and processes on your VM when it is deallocated.
• Systems have long boot times due to memory intensive applications. These applications can be initialized on VMs and hibernated. These “prewarmed” VMs can then be quickly started when needed, with the applications already up and running in the desired state.

Start saving and enjoy more flexible VM management today with hibernation.

To learn more about Hibernate feature and how to use it on Azure DevTest Labs, please visit Hibernate VMs in Azure DevTest Labs.

Please note that Hibernation support is limited to certain VM sizes and OS versions. Make sure you have a supported configuration before using hibernation. To learn more about Hibernation in general, its supported configurations in Azure, and other limitations, check out the Hibernation for Azure Virtual Machines overview.

Get started with DevTest Labs today! To learn more about Azure DevTest Lab, visit What is Azure DevTest Labs? – Azure DevTest Labs | Microsoft Learn.

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