New unmanaged disks cannot be created after Sept 30th, 2023.

[rybal06]

Description

The storage team at Microsoft has made this announcement:

• As of November 18, 2022, new customer subscriptions won't be eligible to create unmanaged disks.
• As of September 30, 2023, existing customers won't be able to create new unmanaged disks.
• On September 30, 2025, customers will no longer be able to start IaaS VMs by using unmanaged disks. Any VMs that are still running or allocated will be stopped and deallocated.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/unmanaged-disks-deprecation

The packer build files in this repository creates the temporary build VM using unmanaged disks; and captures the image to unmanaged disks (VHDs in a storage account)

This has been dismissed in the past citing internal "infrastructure changes"; but now we are 29 days away from the EOL date set forth by the Storage team at Microsoft.
#7407 #2224 #8132 #8167 #5104

I am aware of various workarounds for this issue; but I am curious how the team maintaining this repo is planning to handle EOL and what options are available to customers.

I also want to extend a special thanks to the team maintaining this repo. This is tedious and challenging maintenance work and by making this available to customers we are hosting our own VMSS agents which reside on our vNets within Azure which have all of the features and capabilities of MS-hosted agents. This lets us deploy/manage resources in Azure which do not allow public access without needing to resort to firewall rule hacks on Azure resources to temporarily allow the public IP of MS-hosted agents to connect.

It would be a losing battle for us to try to maintain all of the software and functionality which is contained in this repo. Thanks!

Platforms affected

• Azure DevOps
• GitHub Actions - Standard Runners
• GitHub Actions - Larger Runners

Runner images affected

• Ubuntu 20.04
• Ubuntu 22.04
• macOS 11
• macOS 12
• macOS 13
• Windows Server 2019
• Windows Server 2022

Image version and build link

All versions

Is it regression?

No

Expected behavior

Packer outputs a managed disk which can be added to an image gallery. VMSS/VMS can be linked to this managed disk rather than using VHDs in a storage account.

Image builds will continue to operate after Sept. 30th, 2023.

Actual behavior

Packer is outputting unmanaged VHDs.

Repro steps

Build any image from this repository.

[rybal06]

I missed that this was recently changed. Apologies