Sometimes your Azure VM will get into a Faulted State. At this point, restart requests from the Management Portal, or Powershell will fail. In the past I’ve deleted the VM (remember deleting a VM does NOT delete the underlying OS and data disks), and then recreated it, attaching the disks.

Today, while trolling the forums for other information, I came across a tip worth sharing. Before you go down the path of deleting and recreating the VM, trying changing the size. This will cause a redeployment (as will a delete and recreate) and it seems to fix the faulted state.

Since this can be easily done from the portal, I find it easier to do then to script out the PowerShell to delete and recreate (even with a template). You’ll have a little more down time, and you’ll get charge extra for that bump in size, but I’m ok with that.