Azure Automation - Start and Stop VM

This sample combines terraform and powershell to deploy an Azure Automation account with runbooks and schedules in order to manage VM off-hours state.

Terraform is used to create Azure resources that will run the powershell runbook. The runbook itself stops and starts VMs based on a tag defined on them (see instructions below). Please note that this runbook do not manage each day of the week independently but as 2 groups : weekdays and weekends. It means that a VM will be stopped and started every day from monday to friday and/or from saturday to sunday.

This runbook will target all VMs in a defined subscription, a specific resource group in that subscription can be specified for more precise targetting.

Instructions

The main focus is on the tag you deploy on your VM. The default name is StartStopSchedule but it can be changed to match your organization tagging policy.

The value of the tag must match the following expression : Weekdays=07:00-22:00 / Weekends=09:00-20:00. Values for weekdays and weekends can be :

• 0 : VM should be stopped all involved days
• 1 : VM should be started all involved days
• 01:00-22:00 : VM should be started between 01:00 and 22:00 (and stopped otherwise)

Using this sample should be easy :

1. Clone this repo
2. Deploy the tag on your target VMs (check the locals.tf file for tag sample)
3. Get rid of the sample VM if you don't need to test it first
4. Rename the terraform.tfvars.sample file into terraform.tfvars and update the subscription ID
5. Update the locals.tf file to define schedules according to your needs and update if necessary the parameters sent to the runbook in the r-runbook.tf file (see Runbook part below)

Runbook

The runbook accepts 4 parameters:

Parameter	Value	Mandatory	Default value
subscriptionid	ID of the target sub	yes	N/A
resourcegroupname	Name of target RG	no	N/A
tagname	Name of the tag on VM	no	StartStopSchedule
timezone	Timezone	no	UTC

Parameters are passed to the runbook this way (their names must be lowercase) :

  parameters = {
    subscriptionid    = var.subscription-id
    resourcegroupname = azurerm_resource_group.rg.name
    tagname           = "StopStartSchedule"
    timezone          = "Romance Standard Time"
  }

Terraform

In its actual state, this sample will deploy the following resources:

• A resource group
• An automation account (without the mandatory RunAsAccount, must be created manually)
• Powershell modules needed by the runbook (Az.Account, etc.) in the automation account
• Powershell runbooks and schedules
  • Update powershell modules with a schedule : once a month
  • Start and Stop VM with 2 schedules to run the script every half hour : on every plain hour (i.e. 10:00) and one every hour and a half (i.e 10:30)