Guest OS Family 1 retirement notice

Important

As of March 31, 2025, cloud Services (extended support) is deprecated and will be fully retired on March 31, 2027. Learn more about this deprecation and how to migrate.

The retirement of OS Family 1 was first announced on June 1, 2013.

Sept 2, 2014 The Azure Guest operating system (Guest OS) Family 1.x, which is based on the Windows Server 2008 operating system, was officially retired. All attempts to deploy new services or upgrade existing services using Family 1 fail with an error message informing you that the Guest OS Family 1 is retired.

November 3, 2014 Extended support for Guest OS Family 1 ended. Guest OS Family 1 is retired. This retirement affects all services still on Family 1. We may stop those services at any time. There's no guarantee your services continue to run unless you manually upgrade them yourself.

If you have other questions, visit the Microsoft Question & Answer page for Cloud Services or contact Azure support.

Are you affected?

This retirement affects your cloud services if any one of the following applies:

• You have a value of "osFamily = "1" explicitly specified in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file for your Cloud Service.
• You don't have a value for osFamily explicitly specified in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file for your Cloud Service. Currently, the system uses the default value of "1" in this case.
• The Azure portal lists your Guest Operating System family value as "Windows Server 2008".

To find which of your cloud services are running which OS Family, you can run the following script in Azure PowerShell, though you must set up Azure PowerShell first. For more information on the script, see Azure Guest OS Family 1 End of Life: June 2014.

foreach($subscription in Get-AzureSubscription) {
    Select-AzureSubscription -SubscriptionName $subscription.SubscriptionName

    $deployments=get-azureService | get-azureDeployment -ErrorAction Ignore | where {$_.SdkVersion -NE ""}

    $deployments | ft @{Name="SubscriptionName";Expression={$subscription.SubscriptionName}}, ServiceName, SdkVersion, Slot, @{Name="osFamily";Expression={(select-xml -content $_.configuration -xpath "/ns:ServiceConfiguration/@osFamily" -namespace $namespace).node.value }}, osVersion, Status, URL
}

The OS Family 1 retirement affects your cloud services if the osFamily column in the script output is empty or contains a "1".

Recommendations

We recommend you migrate your Cloud Service roles to one of the supported Guest OS Families:

Guest OS family 4.x - Windows Server 2012 R2 (recommended)

1. Ensure that your application is using SDK 2.1 or later with .NET framework 4.0, 4.5 or 4.5.1.
2. Set the osFamily attribute to "4" in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file, and redeploy your cloud service.

Guest OS family 3.x - Windows Server 2012

1. Ensure that your application is using SDK 1.8 or later with .NET framework 4.0 or 4.5.
2. Set the osFamily attribute to "3" in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file, and redeploy your cloud service.

Guest OS family 2.x - Windows Server 2008 R2

1. Ensure that your application is using SDK 1.3 and above with .NET framework 3.5 or 4.0.
2. Set the osFamily attribute to "2" in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file, and redeploy your cloud service.

Extended Support for Guest OS Family 1 ended November 3, 2014

Cloud services on Guest OS family 1 are no longer supported. Migrate off family 1 as soon as possible to avoid service disruption.

Next steps

Review the latest Guest OS releases.