In this blog post, I show how to handle 2 typical virtual machine move operations on Azure.
Move a VM from “no infrasstructure redundancy” to a specific Availability Zone
This scenario is supported by the Azure portal. Let’s start from a VM with the following characteristics:
- Name:
machine-01 - Linux
- OS disk LRS 30Gb
to move this VM to a specific Availability Zone, from Azure portal go to:
machine-01> availability + scaling > Availability Zones > get Started- select Target Availability Zone >
Zone 1
in this migration:
- A new virtual machine is created
- New NIC is created along with the zonal VM
- you can optionally change target virtual network and subnet
- VM will be stopped during the process to avoid data loss. There will be a brief downtime of few minutes and copy of VM(s) will be created in the target zone
- the machine created will be in another resource group
at the end of the moving process, you can safetly delete the source machine.
Move a VM from an availability zone to another
This is unsupported.
Transform a VM from “availability zone xx” to “no infrastructure redundancy” is also not supported.
If you need to change availability zone to a VM you can follow these steps:
- Turn-off source VM
- Create a full snapshot (ZRS) of the OS disk
- Create a managed disk from the snapshot, in the availability zone target
- Select the OS disk created, and select [create VM] from the disk
More information:
- Availiability Zones: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-gb/azure/reliability/availability-zones-overview?tabs=azure-cli
- https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/attach-os-disk?tabs=portal