Since July 1, 2026, Microsoft no longer sells or renews Azure Reserved VM Instances for a wide list of legacy virtual machine series. It is the kind of change that generates a support article rather than a headline, which is precisely why it is worth flagging: the organisations affected are unlikely to notice until an invoice arrives at a materially higher amount than usual.
What is actually retiring
One-year Reserved VM Instances are retired for the Av2, Amv2, Bv1, D, Ds, Dv2, Dsv2, F, Fs, Fsv2, G, Gs, Ls and Lsv2 series. Both one-year and three-year reservations are retired for the Dv3, Dsv3, Ev3 and Esv3 series, which is significant because those four families have been a default choice for general-purpose and memory-optimised workloads for several years and remain widely deployed.
Existing reservations are not cancelled. They continue to provide their discount for the remainder of the committed term. The retirement bites at renewal: once a covered reservation expires on or after July 1, 2026, it cannot be renewed, full stop, regardless of when it was originally purchased or how long the organisation has been renewing it automatically.
The part that catches finance teams off guard
If no action is taken before a reservation lapses, the underlying VM does not stop running. It simply reverts to pay-as-you-go billing, which Microsoft’s own guidance notes can run up to 72 percent higher than the reserved rate. For an organisation running a meaningful footprint of Dv3, Ev3, or similar instances under multi-year reservations set to auto-renew, this can mean a substantial unplanned cost increase landing quietly in the next billing cycle, discovered only when a monthly Azure invoice looks unusually large.
What Microsoft recommends instead
Rather than renewing a retiring VM series reservation, Microsoft is steering customers toward the Azure savings plan for compute, which provides a commitment-based discount that is not tied to a specific VM family or region and automatically covers eligible compute usage even as workloads move to newer instance generations. The alternative path is migrating the workload itself to a current-generation series, such as Dv5 or Ev5, and purchasing a reservation against that instead.
Both paths require action before the existing reservation term ends. Neither happens automatically, and Microsoft is not going to proactively re-architect a customer’s reservation portfolio on their behalf.
Why this deserves a FinOps review now, not at renewal time
European organisations running Azure at scale typically hold a portfolio of reservations purchased at different times, across different subscriptions, by different teams. A retirement notice buried in a cost management console is easy for any one team to miss, particularly when the reservation was set up years ago by someone no longer at the organisation. The sensible response is a full audit of active reservations against the retiring VM series list, not a wait-and-see approach that only surfaces the problem on the invoice after the discount has already lapsed.
If your organisation needs help auditing your Azure reservation portfolio, modelling the cost impact of migrating to savings plans versus newer VM generations, or simply confirming nothing is about to quietly revert to pay-as-you-go pricing, contact Excello Digital. We help engineering and finance teams keep Azure cost commitments under control instead of discovering the gap on an invoice.