How to create purposefully outdated virtual machine

Question

Hi,
i work as a security engineer. in my work, sometimes i would demonstrate a certain exploit to a certain vulnerability. I am now learning Azure, and wonder how can I create a VM, with previous version of Windows or Linux images? let say I want to create a win10 image prior to August 2020 update, how to do that?

Thanks for any suggestion.

Answer 1

@Teguh Wilidarma (SE-ID) They are couple of ways to try this:

• Simply use a bases image (MSDN Image which are plane images) to deploy VM in on-prem and migrate it to Azure. The base image will be without any updates.
• Secondly which is much easier is:
  In Azure marketplace repository, we have images with previous versions as well. You can use the image which are already there in repository to build VMs. Note: By default when you create a VM from portal you will get the latest image. To check the previous version you have to run PS cmds

  \# Details about the skus in specified location   
      Get-AzureRmVMImageSku -Location "east us" -PublisherName MicrosoftWindowsServer -Offer WindowsServer  
  

  # Details about the diff versions available for specifc sku in Azure market Place
  Get-AzureRmVMImage -Location "east us" -PublisherName MicrosoftWindowsServer -Offer WindowsServer -Skus 2016-Datacenter

The first command will list all the Windows Server Editions.

Second command will list all the versions(Builds) of 2016 datacenter images

You can try similarly for 2012R2 as well.

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Answer 2

@Teguh Wilidarma (SE-ID) Azure VMs are one of several types of on-demand, scalable computing resources that Azure offers. With VMs, you have total control over the configuration and can install anything you need to perform the work. You don't need to purchase physical hardware when you need to scale or extend your datacenter. Finally, Azure provides additional services to monitor, secure, and manage updates and patches to the OS.

This is how you usually create Virtual Machine in Azure. You can select the image available which consist of not only the latest one available but do have list of older version which are currently under support.

You can refer to this documentation as well which will help you with your learning part as well :)

Hope it helps.

Please 'Accept as answer' if it helped, so that it can help others in the community looking for help on similar topics