More Azure VMs Series Face Retirement in 2022 and 2024

Several Azure VM series will be retired on Aug. 31, 2022, with others to follow on Aug. 31, 2024. This chart lists the Azure VM series that are being retired, the commonly used workloads for each, and suggestions for other Azure VMs to use in their place.

Microsoft has announced that the H, NC, NCv2, ND, and NV series of Azure VMs, including “promo” sizes, will be retired on Aug. 31, 2022. In addition, the A (Basic), A (Standard), and HB series of Azure VMs will be retired on Aug. 31, 2024. All impacted customer Azure VMs remaining on the retirement date will be stopped, set to a deallocated state, and no longer be billed. These retirements follow the retirement of the A8-A11 Azure VM sizes on Mar. 1, 2021. Most of these retirements affect Azure VMs optimized for high-performance computing (HPC) and VMs that provide graphics processing units (GPUs) for compute- or graphics-intensive tasks. 

Customers should inventory their Azure VM usage for VMs affected by these retirements and make plans to migrate any hosted workloads to newer VMs before retirement. In many cases, new versions of the same Azure VM are available with improved capabilities: for example, the HBv2 and HBv3 series VMs supersede the HB series. However, Azure VMs from a different series could meet the requirements of a hosted workload at a lower cost than the Azure VMs series that was used initially, depending on workload requirements. Services like Azure Monitor VM insights and Azure Advisor can be used to evaluate VM workloads and provide recommendations for VM sizing.