Shutdown when idle does not seem to work, Any suggestions?

[Allenjanssens]

We are using Azure Labs for an Engineering course where students have simulations that can take hours to run on a Windows 10 machine. The idea was that students could start the simulation, disconnect and then let it run in the background. When the simulation finished the machine would shut itself down and stop using up budget

We have set up the machines to shutdown automatically if the machine is idle for more than 15 min but this does not seem to work.

Any clues, any other options or suggestions? We don't want to shutdown automatically if they disconnect because we want the simulations to continue even if they are not connected.

Thanks

[#2 · Accepted solution]

Hi there, unfortunately our auto-shutdown settings currently do not enable custom definitions of what "idle" means. The "shut-down when idle" setting shuts down when there is no user input (keyboard, mouse) and if the CPU usage is low.
If you have a good estimate of how long the simulations run on average, you could try setting the auto-shutdown when idle to be much longer (e.g. several hours). You could also try setting stop-only schedules at specific times that will shut down all the student VMs by a certain time.

[#3]

Thanks for the insights, I will try them.