Automation Accounts and Start/Stop VM Solutions in Azure

At work one of our customers has a huge number of vm’s that people in their teams use on and off, in order to keep costs down for them we wanted to turn these vm’s off at certain times, say shut them down at 8pm at night and restart them say 7am in the morning the next day – note this will save a lot of money over time.

To achieve this I was using an Azure automation account and using the Start / Stop solutions which allow you to set up schedules for doing just what I wanted.

I tested this out on the dev environment first (as you do) and it worked great, so I tried to delete the solution and create a new one which covers dev, integration and the quality environments but hmm I got this error when trying to delete the solution.

Hmm, ok what’s going on here then?, maybe its a browser issue, nope, re-open the browser, try a different browser, nope, nope and nope.

Ok so I’m googling and reading all sorts of stuff (Stack overflow for me is 99 replies and 1 right answer these days), nothing working.

I know I’ll tweet @AzureSupport and ask them, they then respond and very kindly gave me 1 free support ticket and after only a couple of emails back and forth they tell me I have a resource lock on the solution, I check that and nope I don’t, they tell me I have a resource lock of some sort and low and behold on the resource group was a resource lock.

Delete the resource lock and boom it deletes just fine, this wont be a particularly common issue for folks, but I’m blogging about it in case anyone comes across it and most likely I’ll forget and reach my own blog again one day as normally happens.