Retirement: End of life reminder of HBv2/HC-Series/NP-Series Azure Virtual Machine in Azure Batch Pool

Microsoft Azure will retire support for HBv2-series, HC-series, and NP-series VMs in Azure Batch pools on May 31, 2027, including:

• HBv2-series: 120 AMD EPYC 7V12 vCPUs, 480 GB RAM, 200 Gb/s HDR InfiniBand
• HC-series: 44 Intel Xeon Platinum 8168 vCPUs, 352 GB RAM, 100 Gb/s EDR InfiniBand
• NP-series: Xilinx Alveo U250 FPGA-accelerated VMs

These VM series have been superseded by newer generations with improved performance and better price-performance.

Recommended migration targets:

• HBv2-series → HBv3-series or HBv4-series (3rd/4th Gen AMD EPYC, 200/400 Gb/s NDR InfiniBand)
• HC-series → HX-series (4th Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors)
• NP-series → No direct replacement. Evaluate GPU-based NC/ND-series VMs or partner FPGA solutions.

Recommended action:

Migrate your Batch pools to supported VM sizes before May 31, 2027. After that date, new Batch pools with these VM sizes cannot be created, and existing pools will be subject to forced resize to zero nodes. Existing pools cannot be updated in-place; creating a new pool is required. Review the Batch pool VM sizes documentation and the update pool properties guide for instructions.