Move Azure VM with Managed Disk to another Resource Group

At the moment of writing this blog it’s unfortunately not possible to move an Azure VM with Managed disk to another Resource Group or to another Description. However, Microsoft says on the Azure Portal that this will be possible in the near feature. For the time being, I have chosen to write a small PowerShell script that will do the move fully automated for you. At the moment the only way to move an Azure VM with Managed Disk to another resource group is redeploying the VM. To achieve this you need to perform the following steps (some from the portal and some from PowerShell) manually:

  1. Shutdown VM
  2. Collect the required information like Networking, VM size, Storage etc.
  3. Create a Snapshot
  4. Create or use an existing Azure Storage Account to copy the Snapshot to
  5. Remove the VM
  6. Create a new Azure VM in the new Resource Group with the collected information and Snapshot disk from the Azure Blob
  7. The Azure VM will start automatically, check if the VM functions as it should and remove the Snapshot and Azure Storage Account.

As you can see there are about 7 steps needed to move an Azure VM with a Managed Disk. The script that I have written will do all the steps automatically with only 3 variables that you need to define while running the script. (more…)

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