Last week while migrating Azure IaaS VMs from ASM to ARM, I noticed that one VM was showing the status “Running (Installing Extension)” in the Azure Classic portal. When I tried to connect to that specific VM with RDP no connection could be made. This status also prevented me from doing some automation activities, the VM however still responded to a ping.

When I opened the DASHBOARD page of the VM and looked at the extensions, I saw that the Microsoft.Compute.VMAccessAgent showed following error:

The simplest way I found to resolve this error was to delete the extension, and add it back. To do so login to the Azure portal with your Azure account. Go to Virtual Machines and click on the specific VM. On the opened blade select Extensions, right click the VMAccessAgent and click Delete. When asked to delete the extension select Yes

To reinstall the VMAccess extension open PowerShell ISE, connect to your Azure subscription with your Azure account and run the following command (replace cloud service name and VM name by your own)

To check the current status of the extension, run following command (replace cloud service name and VM name by your own):

Or you can also check trough both Azure portals

After the reinstallation of the VMAccessAgent, it ran with STATUS Success and I was able to reconnect to the VM with RDP. This concludes this blog post, hope it helps whenever you have this issue.

Wim Matthyssen (@wmatthyssen)