It is strongly recommended to use managed disks when deploying virtual machines in Azure. But one of the downsides of managed disks is that you are unable to move your virtual machines to another subscription. That is….until now!

At Ignite 2018 Microsoft announced an update to the Microsoft.Compute Resource provider that let’s us move virtual machines with managed disks. To be able to use the new feature you need to register the new Resource Provider feature first with the following command from PowerShell or from the Azure CLI.

First open the Azure CLI from the Azure portal

and run the following command:

az feature register --namespace Microsoft.Compute --name ManagedResourcesMove

Once the feature “ManagedResourcesMove” is registered you need to invoke the Resource Provider registration to propagate the change.

az provider register --namespace Microsoft.Compute

It can take quite some time for the updated Resource Provider to be propagated. You can monitor the status with

az provider show -n Microsoft.Compute

After a few minutes you should be able to move your virtual machine to another subscription!

Thanks,
Alex