Last weekend I successfully created an automation account in Azure to auto start-stop my Azure VMs as described here:  Start/Stop VMs during off-hours solution in Azure Automation. Right after that I realized that I forgot to exclude some VMs from this routine.

I have configured tons of new resources but how to make changes after creation of that resources, especially how can I exclude some of my VMs? As almost always, PowerShell is the right way to do such things.

The excluded VMs are stored in the External_ExcludeVMNames variable. The screen below shows the variable using the PowerShell cloud shell.

Get-AzAutomationVariable -Name External_ExcludeVMNames -AutomationAccountName AutomateStartStop -ResourceGroupName Group1

Note that the Automation account name and resource group name must be specified in the command. To find out your automation account and resource group name run

Get-AzAutomationAccount

Get-AzResourceGroup

Which brings me to the point. I want to exclude the computers dc02 and cl01 from the start-stop schedule. Here is the command to do just that.

Get-AzAutomationVariable -Name External_ExcludeVMNames -AutomationAccountName AutomateStartStop -ResourceGroupName Group1 | Set-AzAutomationVariable -Value 'dc02,cl01'

We’re done. All virtual computers will be started and stopped according to a fixed schedule, except dc02 and cl01.

See you next time with PowerShell!