One of the more frustrating aspects about creating an Azure virtual machine is that if you do not place it into an availability zone at deployment time, you’ve traditionally had to rebuild it later. That usually meant starting from scratch or detaching the disks, creating a new VM, and reattaching them. Neither option is not horribly impactful, but both can be inconvenient and time-consuming. Until now.
Things Have Changed
While examining a virtual machine for a client, I discovered a new simpler method, move a virtual machine into a given availabilty zone with a few clicks of the mouse button. With the appropriate permissions, Azure will assign a system-managed identity and then effectively copy the virtual machine into whichever zone you choose. When the process completes, you’ll have two virtual machines: