Unable to resize Azure VM to certain size or limited size available

A client of mine today came asking why he couldn’t resize his A series machine to other series. All he see was the other A series and older generation D series. Well, a simple indication is because of the cluster that his VM is sitting on. Especially when your VM is in the Running status. So you basically can only select sizes that is current supported in the cluster.

Some other sizes, you can easily resize them to other series on the fly but tor this case, the only way is to first stop and deallocate the VM. Once you’ve done that, you will be able to see the other VM series and you will be able to select the new size.

Sometimes, you may still be unable to see the other sizes even after deallocating the VM. That’s normal as the process is still very much dependable on Microsoft’s DC capacity at that point of time. You probably might want to wait for a while more and come back later to resize your VM if it’s not urgent.

Else, you can try another trick where you move your VM another size that isn’t your intended size. This some how forces a process to move your VM to a new cluster. After which, you can try resizing it again to the size that you wanted.

Another method is actually to stop, deallocate and delete the VM first. Do not delete anything else other than the compute component. I would assume you have already set your IP to a static IP at this point. Your OS Disk and other network component will not be deleted. So all you need to do is just go to the OS disk overview and spin up a new VM using the OS Disk and attach all other existing vNets and datadisk.

Easy isn’t it? =)