Set TimeZone on Windows Azure Virtual Machines

1
votes

We are planning to host our web application Windows Azure Virtual Machines(IaaS). The application was developed to work in Central European time zone(CET). Will there be any problem if we change the time zone on Azure VMs from UTC to CET?

For example if there is any auto-disaster-recovery / restart / any other maintenance operation on any virtual machine, will we have to explicitly log-in and set the time-zone as per our preference or will time-zone setting be preserved ?

Changing time-zone is not recommended for Web Roles and Worker roles(Platform as a Service) as per this article "Manage TimeZone for Applications on Windows Azure" as it can introduce instability. Can there be a similar issue (e.g. issues with load-balancing multiple Azure VMs in the same availability set)?

Eventually we will upgrade application to use TimeZone API but would like to change time-zone on virtual machines to quickly move our application to Azure.

1
c#azuretimezoneazure-virtual-machine
That's a bad idea in general. You should always use UTC everywhere. - SLaks
@SLaks: I completely agree with you but we have some time constraints because of which we want to consider this option...In long term we are going to more over UTC. Just wanted to know if Azure VMs (IaaS) would support this and not create any instability in the environment unlike PaaS where this is not supported. - Gaurav
I have several VM's that I run in our local timezone. We deallocate them every night and they come back up in our local timezone. - crthompson
Thanks @paqogomez...I was curious about a specific use case where there are multiple VMs under same cloud service and availability set. Will there be any issue in this case? Also could you please elaborate on how you de-allocate VMs.Is it only VM Shutdown or do you delete VM along with associated VHD? - Gaurav
+1 to Slaks argument. Another way to look at it is that your application should not care what time zone the server is set to. If you avoid using things like DateTime.Now, or TimeZoneInfo.Local, then it won't matter what the server's time zone is because you will never depend on it. - Matt Johnson-Pint

1 Answers

5
votes

AFAIK Virtual Machines (IAAS) are in your complete control. There are no Azure agents installed on those machines and Azure has no knowledge or care as to what is done inside them. Any Azure-related updates/upgrades/reboots happen from the "outside" on Azure's schedule. Thus, you can change the time zone or other settings.