Display Temp VMs created by Power Off & Set as Image Task(s) in the Desktop Images Section

Welcome to the community, Peter Gibbons 🙂!

Can you explain a little more your use case for this (I'm not understanding it😟)?
Are you thinking of having it in the Servers AND Desktop Images or just move it completely into Desktop Images?

As far as I understand it, the whole point of a temporary VM is that is only there temporarily. If it finishes or has a problem, NMM will clean it up or destroy it. I know I haven't ever logged, but that doesn't mean I should've been all of this time. 😆

As far as I understand it, the whole point of a temporary VM is that is only there temporarily.

-If a Power Off and Set as Image task fails, these temp VMs remain indefinitely for troubleshooting purposes (sysprep) and they remain ON until you manually remove them, turn them off, or manually initiate a "cleanup" on the failed Power off and Set as Image task which will delete this temp VM. 

We have seen that if you're not actively monitoring the Severs module, you may have a temp VM that was created from a failed power off & set as image task that is running and racking up unnecessary azure spend. For example you do weekly, scheduled power off and set as image tasks with pre-configured scripted actions and one of the scheduled tasks fails but you didn't notice it right away < You've now had a VM allocated/running 24/7 for no good reason until you notice the mistake.

Would it help if you activate the error handling and enable cleanup after failure? If I understand correctly, this will remove the temp vm which has been created if it fails. If you want to keep the temp vm to analyze logs, you can alter the hours to wait. This way you can maybe use it as a safekeep to prevent temp vm's from running a long time. 

Another possible method would be a runbook to check on these temp vm's at a recurring schedule and to stop them and notify you of a cleanup action to be taken.

Altough I understand your point regarding moving it in to the desktop image view...

Great call-out, Milan Kurent, utilizing a runbook to automatically clean-up the temporary VMs would be a great work around.
I'm not familiar with the "activate the error handling and enable cleanup after failure" feature. Can you help my understanding by elaborating on what that is and how we can use it?

Peter Gibbons, I know Chuck (from the Nerdio Team) recommends setting up notifications so that anytime an imaging process or deployment fails, it creates a ticket and his team doesn't wake-up to any surprises or unavailable hosts.

Another option (bandaid) would be to utilize the Unused Resouces Report to help catch things that are running and shouldn't be.

Either way, having the temporary VMs displaying in both blades shouldn't make a huge impact on the performance of NMM and shouldn't be too hard to impliment (from a coding perspective) 🤞. But, then again, I'm not a programmer so I have no clue as to the level of difficulty. 😆

Hey Everyone,

I'm Andy - Product Manager for Nerdio Manage for MSP. I think there are some great solutions here! Setting up notifications and utilizing the Unused Resource Report are great ways to catch those errors and help make sure some of those temporary resources don't get left around.

Milan also brings up a great point, in January we added some error handling and cleanup functionality to the Set as Image process. You can set Retry Thresholds, so NMM will automatically try the process again, as well some cleanup options to delete the temporary resources. Have you had a chance to check out these new options?

I'll see what options we have for tagging those temporary resources, but I'm interested to hear if these options will help solve some of your challenges with Set-as-image failures.

-Andy

The way I usually find out about these TMP servers is that our image backups pick them up too lol