Microsoft has announced the upcoming retirement of their legacy NV and NV_Promo series instance types on August 31, 2023. These instance types were originally released on December 1, 2016 with Frame being the first DaaS solution on the market to support these instances at their launch. These instances all leverage NVIDIA Tesla M60 GPUs (Maxwell Architecture).
As a result, customers with Frame Accounts deployed on Microsoft Azure will no longer be able to use the following instance types after August 31, 2023:
- Pro 56GB (
Standard_NV6) - Pro 224GB (
Standard_NV24)
Frame customers utilizing these instance types are advised to migrate to one of the more modern NVIDIA or AMD instance types that are recommended by Microsoft as soon as possible to avoid user impact.
Effective July 15, 2023, Frame will no longer support NV VMs on new Frame Accounts.
How Does This EOL Impact Me?
Frame customers who are not using Azure NV series instance types are not impacted.
After August 31, 2023, Microsoft will deallocate any remaining NV VMs by stopping and removing these VMs from customer Azure environments.
Frame customers are strongly advised to manually migrate any existing VMs (Sandbox, Utility Servers, Instance Pools, and Persistent Desktops) currently using an NV instance to one of the Microsoft-recommended instances below.
Standard_NV6toStandard_NV12s_v3Standard_NV24toStandard_NV48s_v3
We strongly recommend customers confirm that they have successfully switched any NV instances to the recommended instance types by August 20, 2023.
For any VMs that remain on NV instances on August 21, 2023 at 12AM PDT / 9AM CET, Frame will automatically attempt to power off and change the instance type per Microsoft recommendations.
In order for the automatic conversion to be successful, VMs must not have any active user sessions and customers must have sufficient quota within their Azure subscription for the new Azure instance types. For any VMs that fail to automatically migrate, Frame will evaluate taking additional actions at that time.
After August 31, 2023, any remaining Frame VMs still hosted on NV instances will be automatically terminated within Frame, as they no longer exist within Microsoft Azure. Any stateful VMs (Sandbox, Utility Servers, Persistent Desktops) and associated data/configurations hosted on NV instances will be lost unless recent backups of those VMs are available within Frame.
I Am Impacted, What Actions Do I Need To Take?
Customers with any Frame VMs hosted on NV instances should manually migrate the VMs to a different supported instance type by August 20, 2023. Please refer to Microsoft’s NV Series Migration Guide for recommended instance types to migrate to.
Please refer to our following documentation for how to change instance types:
- Change Sandbox instance type
- Change Utility Server instance type
- Change Persistent Desktop instance type
For customers looking to migrate from NV to NVv4 instances (AMD powered), depending on when the Frame Account was initially created, you may need to first install the appropriate Azure AMD driver (either on Sandbox and Publish or on Persistent Desktop VMs) before being able to properly use NVv4 instances. Customers can download the latest Azure AMD driver for NVv4 instances here.
Additional Questions
1. Does this have any impact on NVv3 or NVv4 instance types?
No, only the standard NV series instance types are being retired by Microsoft.
2. How do I check which of my VMs are using NV instances?
The easiest way is to go to the Dashboard for each of your Frame Accounts deployed in Azure and go to Status > Servers. From this page you will be able to sort by the Instance Type column and look for either Standard_NV6 or Standard_NV24.
3. I am unable to migrate to one of the recommended instance types due to lack of available quota within my Microsoft Azure subscription. How do I increase my quota for these instance types?
You will need to submit a support request via Microsoft Azure Portal.
4. I need assistance or have additional questions.
We are committed to making this transition as seamless as possible for our customers. If you need additional assistance or have any questions regarding this migration please do not hesitate to open a support case.