Approve proximity-group removal before preview regional-to-zonal VM migration

Source facts

Microsoft’s in-place regional-to-zonal VM migration is a public preview and is not available in the Azure portal. It requires deallocation and cannot return the VM to regional placement. A VM in a proximity placement group must remove that association during zone assignment. Availability-set VMs are outside this procedure; Basic public IPs, Basic Load Balancer configurations, and unmanaged disks are also unsupported until converted to the documented alternatives. Microsoft Learn.

Applicability

Review one regional VM against the preview registration, permissions, tool versions, and target-zone size requirements. Identify which application dependencies motivated its current proximity placement. Keep this in-place preview distinct from a Resource Mover workflow that creates replacement resources.

DSE recommendation

Approve the loss of the proximity-placement-group association and the one-way zone transition before deallocating the VM. Ask the application owner to define acceptable behavior after the placement change. Record the intended zone and the prerequisites that must already be satisfied. Plan recovery around an approved alternative rather than promising to reverse the zone property back to regional placement.

Verification

After the authorized zone assignment and start, inspect the VM’s zone and proximity-group association. Confirm that the observed location matches the approved decision and test communication with the application’s dependent services. Compare latency-sensitive workflows with their acceptance criteria. Preserve the before-and-after placement record and unresolved differences; a successful property update alone does not establish that removing the original placement constraint was acceptable for the workload.

Official references

Microsoft Learn: Migrate a regional virtual machine to an availability zone. Source reviewed September 9, 2026.