(in Azure) Are VMs still tied to a specific machine and thus if the machine goes down the VMs need be restarted?
Howwwwever, LRS storage does not save you if the whole datacenter goes down, or during scheduled maintenance (when the whole datacenter is down.) For that, you'll need ZRS (which does failover to a co-lo in the event of the primary datacenter going down) or GRS (for which you can configure/test your failover options.)
Also, Microsoft's strength is in their PaaS services, like app-service or Azure-Functions. Those usually have CosmosDB on the backend, which is pretty much the best failover/DB-availability server-software on the market in my opinion.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/wind...
I've found actual reboots to be rare - the exception being the recent Spectre / Meltdown patching.