IT Navigator - Daymark Solutions Blog

Azure Classic VMs Full Retirement Date Looming

Written by Chris Beamon | Thu, Jun 22, 2023

Microsoft’s Azure Virtual Machine (Classic) is approaching its full retirement date of September 1, 2023. "Classic" in IaaS VMs refers to VMs managed by Azure Service Manager (ASM). While ASM has full IaaS capabilities and many enhancements over the years, the management of IaaS VMs through Azure Service Manager was deprecated by Microsoft in February 2020. ASM is the old control plane of Azure, responsible for creating, managing, and deleting VMs as well as performing other control plane operations. It’s estimated that 10% of IaaS VMs are still using Azure ASM. Those organizations need to start planning their migration today, given that full retirement is less than three months away.

Impact of this Retirement Notice

On September 1, 2023, the IaaS VMs (Classic) will be fully retired and any active or allocated VMs will be suspended and deallocated. Customers will no longer be able to start IaaS VMs by using ASM. Any that are still running or allocated will be stopped and deallocated. Businesses should prioritize completing this migration as soon as possible to prevent business impact and to take advantage of the improved performance, security, and new features of Azure Resource Manager.

Please note: Microsoft is not deprecating the existing classic APIs, Cloud Services and resource model.

Daymark Can Help

Planning and execution of migration greatly depends on the complexity of the architecture. Daymark can work with you to determine a migration strategy for the retirement of Classic VMs customized for your organization, which will include a comprehensive analysis of aging architectures and resources. With over 50 Microsoft certifications and specializations and a long-standing close partnership with Microsoft, we can streamline your migration before you are negatively impacted and share our best practices to leverage the full potential of Azure. Contact us today to get started.

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