Azure Virtual Machines
An Azure service that is used to provision Windows and Linux virtual machines.
9,043 questions
Hello Keanu Mellett,
You can download the ISO for Windows Server 2022 Datacenter: Azure Edition from the official Microsoft Evaluation Center at the following link: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/download-windows-server-2022. This ISO includes the Azure Edition variant and is provided primarily for evaluation purposes, with a 180-day trial period. Please note that the Azure Edition is optimized for Azure-specific features such as Hotpatching and SMB over QUIC, and it is intended for use within Azure environments.
If you're attempting to perform an in-place upgrade of an existing Azure VM using this ISO, be aware that certain upgrade options such as retaining apps and files may be unavailable during setup. This is due to edition-specific constraints and the fact that Azure Edition has tailored configurations not always compatible with in-place upgrade paths. In such cases, a more supported approach would be to deploy a new VM from the Azure Marketplace using the desired image and migrate your workloads accordingly.
For more detailed guidance on Azure Edition features and upgrade considerations, you can refer to Microsoft’s documentation here: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started/azure-edition.
If you are going via the Azure Marketplace path then you can follow Microsoft’s official guide here to do that: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/quick-create-portal
Once the new VM is deployed, you can migrate your workloads in one of the following supported ways:
For manual file transfers, use the Robocopy utility as described in Microsoft’s command-line reference: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administration/windows-commands/robocopy
If you have Azure Backup enabled, restore the old VM as a new one using this guide: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/backup/backup-azure-arm-restore-vms
For production-grade migrations with minimal downtime, use Azure Site Recovery to replicate the VM and fail it over into a new Azure Edition instance: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/site-recovery/azure-to-azure-tutorial-migrate
Hope I was able to clear your query here. It would be great if you could kindly mark the answer as accepted so that anyone in the MS Q&A community having similar query can refer to this post. Thanks
