Question

When an Azure virtual machine is stopped, what happens to the associated storage costs?

a) Storage costs are reduced.

b) Storage costs remain the same.

c) Storage costs are completely waived.

d) Storage costs are reimbursed for the downtime.

Answer 1

When an Azure virtual machine is stopped, the storage costs remain the same because the VHD and other storage resources continue to incur costs, despite the VM's compute resources not being billed if it is deallocated.

Step-by-step explanation:

When an Azure virtual machine is stopped, the storage costs remain the same. The reason behind this is that the associated storage with the virtual machine, such as the VHD (Virtual Hard Disk), continues to persist in Azure's storage to retain the VM's state and data, ensuring that no data is lost. Therefore, even when a virtual machine is not running, the data remains in Azure Blob Storage and the storage costs, which includes the cost for storing the VHDs, are still incurred.

That being said, only the compute resources are no longer billed when the virtual machine is in the 'Stopped (Deallocated)' state, as opposed to just 'Stopped'. Once the VM is deallocated, you will not be charged for the virtual machine's compute resources, but storage costs will still apply for the VHD and any other associated storage resources.

Option b) Storage costs remain the same is the correct answer in this context.