In-Place Upgrade of Azure VMs from Gen 1 to Gen 2 in Preview

Support for upgrading existing Azure generation 1 (Gen 1) VMs to generation 2 (Gen 2) is available in preview as of Feb. 2025. Previously, there was no upgrade path from Azure Gen 1 VMs to Gen 2, and customers who wanted to adopt Azure Gen 2 VMs had to deploy new VMs to replace existing Gen 1 VMs. Once generally available, this capability will make it easier for customers to move existing Azure VM workloads to Gen 2 VMs and adopt trusted launch security features.

Azure Gen 2 VMs offer larger processor, memory, and OS disk capacity than Gen 1 VMs, and they support most benefits of on-premises Hyper-V Gen 2 VMs (see fig. 1). Trusted launch, which is not available for Gen 1 VMs, provides a virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) compliant with the TPM 2.0 specification, enabling Secure Boot and virtualization-based security (VBS) capabilities. Trusted launch also allows administrators to enable Hypervisor Code Integrity (HVCI) and Windows Defender Credential Guard on Azure VMs.