Plan for maintenance and downtime There are three scenarios that can lead to your virtual machine in Azure being impacted: unplanned hardware maintenance, unexpected downtime, and planned maintenance. Unplanned Hardware Maintenance event occurs when the Azure platform predicts that the hardware or any platform component associated to a physical machine, is about to fail. When the platform predicts a failure, it will issue an unplanned hardware maintenance event. Azure uses Live Migration technology to migrate the Virtual Machines from the failing hardware to a healthy physical machine. Live Migration is a VM preserving operation that only pauses the Virtual Machine for a short time, but performance might be reduced before and/or after the event. Unexpected Downtime is when the hardware or the physical infrastructure for the virtual machine fails unexpectedly. Unexpected downtime can include local network failures, local disk failures, or other rack level failures. Whe...