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POWindows Azure VM (Iaas) unexpected restarts
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copied!<p>I have a number of VMs on Windows Azure (Iaas) hosting a website. There are a number of load-balanced front-end VMs, all connecting to a single VM with SQL Express. It works well.</p> <p>However!</p> <p>I'm getting random restarts across all the VMs. As for the front-end VMs (with IIS), since they are load balanced, the site is not affected and the load balancer adjusts accordingly. But when the VM hosting the database is restarted, the site is down until the DB is up again. It takes < 3min to boot up, but that's still unacceptable if it happens frequently enough. Although the restarts are relatively rare (2 a month per VM), sometimes we get a week with 4 restarts per VM, which gets frustratingly annoying. Not all VMs restart as frequently and I cannot figure out a pattern. Restarts are also unexpected (pull-the-power-cable type of restarts, and not shutdowns). Datacenter is West Europe.</p> <p>Microsoft emphasises that SLA only covers 2VMs in an availability set, which I can't have for the database VM (and the enterprise SQL edition costs an arm and three legs). Also, SQL Azure isn't an option as the application is very chatty, and the SQL Azure database was being throttled during peak times (though it works super smooth with SQL Express on a Medium VM!).</p> <p>My question(s): Is it normal to have so many restarts? Are there other people having the same problem? What is your experience with such an environment on Azure? What can I do to minimise this downtime? </p> <p>Thanks all!</p>

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