Microsoft Azure now has automatic OS image upgrade feature for virtual machines

Home » Azure

Reading time icon 1 min. read

Calendar icon Published on

by Pradeep Viswav 

published on

Share this article

Readers help support MSpoweruser. We may get a commission if you buy through our links. Tooltip Icon

Read our disclosure page to find out how can you help MSPoweruser sustain the editorial team Read more

One of the main pain points when managing cloud infrastructure at very large scale is maintaining each virtual machine patched to the latest OS version. OS providers in general release patched versions of their VM images monthly or more frequently in case of critical security fixes. Manually upgrading hundreds to thousands of VMs increases cloud infrastructure management cost. To solve this problem, Microsoft has now introduced automatic OS image upgrade preview feature for Azure virtual machine scale sets that automatically upgrades all VMs to the latest OS image.

Once this feature is enabled, the latest OS image released by image publishers will automatically be applied to the VM scale set. The OS Disk of a VM is replaced with the new OS Disk created with latest image version. Configured extensions and custom data scripts are run, while persisted data disks will be retained. Microsoft will initially support Windows Server 2016 Datacenter, Windows Server 2012 Datacenter R2 and Ubuntu Server 16.04-LTS operating systems for this feature.

Read more about this feature here.

Pradeep Viswav

Pradeep Viswav Shield

Software and Services Expert

Pradeep is a Computer Science and Engineering Graduate. He was also a Microsoft Student Partner. He is currently working in a leading IT company.

User forum

0 messages