Compute Engine not connecting after changing machine type

Question

I'm running a Windows server 2012 on Google Compute Engine. It has been running fine for months, but today I edited the instance to change the machine type. I had 4 vCPU and 10GB memory, and I changed to 2 vCPU and 8GB memory. I didn't make any other change. The problem is that after the change, the website hosted on this server is not accesible anymore, and I can't even access the server through Remote Desktop. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks.

Answer 1

Glad it's resolved. In case a similar issue happens again:

The fact that the website is inaccessible AND RDP fails as well makes me think of a server issue that's preventing it from operating normally.

The fact that you reduced the resources also indicates a possible CPU exhaustion.

I would:

1 - Check the serial console to see if there are any errors.

2 - Telnet or Nmap the external IP of the server to see if it's responding on ports 3389 (RDP) and 80/443(Web).

3 - Try to revert the changes (Go back to 4 vCPUs and 10 GB ram) to see how it behaves.

4 - Run the below startup script to disable Windows Firewall in case it decided to enable by itself making the external connections impossible. key: 'windows-startup-script-ps1' Value: 'netsh advfirewall set allprofiles state off'

5 - If everything above fails and you have no other choice, Go to this post to see how to recover your website data from your Windows boot disk and use the data in a new VM by mounting the boot disk as an additional disk in the new VM.

Lastly, you should post this type of questions in Serverfault as Stackoverflow is more suited to Dev questions and related.

Answer 2

After many hours, everything went back to normal. I suppose that the virtual machine didn't stop correctly when I made the change and windows started to check the disk, making it impossible to access the server for some hours.