Lucee Developer

In the old Azure portal, you could simply stop a "Classic" Linux VM without doing waagent -deprovision+user, and then create a snapshot from it.
That snapshot could then be succesfully used to create new VM instances. But, as I found out the hard way, this does not work with Azure Linux VMs through the new portal / new style VMs.

So I ended up with a VM image that can only created un-bootable VMs, AND the template VM itself could not be started anymore because it was generalized. The well-known error "Failed to start virtual machine 'templateVM1'. Error: Operation 'start' is not allowed on VM 'templateVM1' since the VM is generalized." occurs when I try to start the VM.

Luckily, I found a simple way to bypass the "since the VM is generalized"  message.

1) go to the "Disks" page in the Azure Portal:

2) Click on the disk that is attached to the generalized VM.

3) Then click "Create Snapshot", and fill in the form:

4) After the snapshot is generated, go to the Disks page, and click "Add".

5) Fill in the "Create managed disk" form, and make sure to select your newly created Snapshot as Source:

6) After the new disk is created, click on it to see details. Then click the button "Create VM":

7) Create the VM as you would normally do. Done!