Do I have VM Roles that I should migrate?

You may have received this kind of e-mail and wonder if you have already VM Roles deployed. There are good chances the answer is no, but let’s check.

 

Dear Customer,

The Windows Azure VM Role preview is being retired on May 15. Please transition to Windows Azure Virtual Machines, and delete your VM Role preview instances as soon as possible. Thank you for participating in the preview program for the Windows Azure VM Role. Since we started the preview program, we have learned a lot about your needs and use cases. Your feedback and insights have helped fine-tune our approach to infrastructure services. We’ve directed all of that feedback into the design of Windows Azure Virtual Machines, the evolution of VM Role. On April 16, 2013, we announced the general availability of Windows Azure Virtual Machines

. Virtual Machines provides on-demand scalable compute resources to meet your growing business needs and can extend your existing infrastructure and apps into the cloud. With the general availability of Windows Azure Virtual Machines we are retiring the VM Role preview.
ACTION REQUIRED Please migrate from VM Role to Virtual Machines, and delete your running instances of VM Role as soon as possible. You can these follow these instructions to migrate to Virtual Machines. Here are important dates to note:

• Starting May 15, 2013, calls to create new VM Role deployments will fail.

• On May 31, 2013, all running VM Role instances will be deleted.

Please note that you will continue to be billed for your VM Role consumption until your running instances are deleted.
Thank you for participating in the VM Role preview program and shaping the future of Windows Azure Virtual machines! You can find more information on Windows Azure Virtual Machines here .
Thank you,
Windows Azure Team

A simple way to check whether you have VM Roles or not is to use the previous portal (the one in Silverlight) which is available at https://windows.azure.com/. From the new portal (https://manage.windowsazure.com) you can choose previous portal in the menu.

 

From the main page, click on Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN

and VM Images

If you have a VM Role image, this looks like this

In my case, it is not instanciated as In use is False (I haven’t used VM Roles for years, I think; this image was created in March 2011!), and I don’t have anything to do.

 

More information is also available at https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg465398.aspx .

Benjamin Guinebertière (@benjguin)