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Guest OS Family 2, 3, and 4 retirement notice

  • Article

The retirement of Azure Guest OS Families 2, 3, and 4 was announced in July 2024, with the following end-of-life dates:

  • Windows Server 2008 R2: December 2024
  • Windows Server 2012 and Windows Server 2012 R2: February 2025

If you have questions, visit the Microsoft question page for Cloud Services or contact Azure support.

Are you affected?

Your Cloud Services or Cloud Services Extended Support are affected if any one of the following applies:

  1. You have a value of osFamily = 2, 3, or 4 explicitly specified in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file for your Cloud Service.
  2. The Azure portal lists your Guest Operating System family value as Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012, or Windows Server 2012 R2.

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.

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
}

This retirement affects your cloud services if the osFamily column in the script output contains a 2, 3, 4, or is empty. If empty, the default osFamily attribute points to osFamily 5.

Recommendations

If this retirement affects you, we recommend you migrate your Cloud Service or Cloud Services Extended Support roles to one of the supported Guest OS Families:

Guest OS family 7.x - Windows Server 2022 (recommended)

  1. Ensure that your application is using Visual Studio 2019 or newer with Azure Development Workload as selected and your application is targeting .NET framework version 4.8 or newer.
  2. Set the osFamily attribute to "7" in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file, and redeploy your cloud service.

Guest OS family 6.x - Windows Server 2019

  1. Ensure that your application is using SDK 2.9.6 or later and your application is targeting .NET framework 3.5 or 4.7.2 or newer.
  2. Set the osFamily attribute to "6" in the ServiceConfiguration.cscfg file, and redeploy your cloud service.

Important clarification regarding support

The announcement of the retirement of Azure Guest OS Families 2, 3, and 4, effective March 2025, pertains specifically to the operating systems within these families. This retirement doesn't extend the overall support timeline for Azure Cloud Services (classic) beyond the scheduled deprecation in August 2024. Cloud Services Extended Support continues support with Guest OS Families 5 and newer.

Customers currently using Azure Cloud Services who wish to continue receiving support beyond August 2024 are encouraged to transition to Cloud Services Extended Support. This separate service offering ensures continued assistance and support. Cloud Services Extended Support requires a distinct enrollment and isn't automatically included with existing Azure Cloud Services subscriptions.

Next steps

Review the latest Guest OS releases.