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Azure Virtual Machines
An Azure service that is used to provision Windows and Linux virtual machines.
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Hello @Farshad
Thanks for reaching out — this is a great question and you're definitely not alone in receiving this notice. Let me walk you through what's happening and what you actually need to do.
Microsoft has introduced a new Azure Marketplace offer for Windows Server 2022 (offer ID: windowsserver2022) that no longer includes .NET 6, which officially reached End of Life in November 2024. The old offer (WindowsServer) with .NET 6 pre-installed will be deprecated on June 9, 2026. After that date, your existing VMs will keep running just fine — but you won't be able to create new VMs, reimage, scale out a VMSS, or restore backups using those old image references.
What you need to do
The fix is straightforward: update your image reference to point to the new offer. The SKU names stay exactly the same only the offer ID changes.
Here's what the updated imageReference looks like in an ARM template:
"imageReference": {
"publisher": "MicrosoftWindowsServer",
"offer": "windowsserver2022",
"sku": "2022-datacenter",
"version": "latest"
}
Just swap out "WindowsServer" → "windowsserver2022" and use the same SKU name you were already using (e.g., 2022-DATACENTER, 2022-DATACENTER-AZURE-EDITION, etc.).
Depending on your setup:
• Standalone VMs — You can either reimage in-place via the Portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell, or spin up a new VM from the updated image and migrate your data using disk snapshots or detach/attach.
• VM Scale Sets (VMSS) — Update the image reference in your ARM template or CLI configuration and run a rolling upgrade. This one is more time-sensitive — VMSS scale-out from deprecated images will be blocked after the enforcement date.
• If you use Automatic OS Upgrades — You're covered. It handles offer and SKU changes automatically, so no manual action is needed.
A note on .NET 6
If any of your applications still depend on .NET 6 at runtime, now is a good time to plan a migration to .NET 8 (LTS) or .NET 10. The new images won't bundle any .NET version at all, so you'd need to handle that deployment yourself going forward.
Links :
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/deprecated-images
Thanks,
Manish.