Question

I have a project run on Azure platform and I have set up all the configurations, most important of all, the database. But the tricky thing is that I login into the virtual machine several days later, all the settings are disappeared. What’s the matter? I haven’t done anything to the VM..
Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Could it be that you changed these settings in a Web Role / Worker Role (PaaS)? You have to know that these ‘virtual machines’ are not persistent. These virtual machines are provisioned with a package you upload through the portal or Visual Studio for example. Every change you make through remote desktop that wasn’t included in the package (installing a database for example), will get lost whenever a hardware failure occurs, when your instance gets a Windows Update, …

If you want to keep those changes you have 2 options:

1. Script the changes with a Startup Task and include the script in the service package. The startup tasks will always be executed when your instance is created or whenever it gets replaced by a new instance (in case of a hardware failure).
2. Don’t use PaaS but use IaaS instead. This is the Virtual Machines preview feature. With Virtual Machines, you can connect to your VM through remote desktop to install and configure whatever you like. The system disks and additional data disks are persisted to blob storage, so you won’t loose any of your changes.