Update: 06/04/2017 – The customer has now had a further update from Microsoft: “We have decided to roll back the OS disk size change, and we are waiting on the replication of the images to occur worldwide. In the meantime, you can still expand your OS drive manually to your desired size (We are going back to 127GB OS drives). This should be completed by Monday 10/04/2016.

While working on a customers site this morning it has been brought to my attention that Microsoft have now started reducing the size of the C:\ Drive on the Azure Marketplace Windows Server base images. When reaching out to Microsoft the customer received the following reply regarding the base images:

“1. All Windows Server base images with Publisher/Offer/Sku are now published with a max size of 30GB instead of 127GB. This change was made to reduce costs for the Managed Disk customers because Managed Disk charges by disk allocation instead of disk usage.

2. Windows Server 2016 Core is introduced in the March release:

3. Non-Hub Windows Server images are also available to be used with the “Windows_Server” HUB flag during VM deployment for all types of subscriptions. This change will be permanent and all HUB Windows Server Images that were created for EA subscriptions will be removed.”

This does not remove the ability to be able to expand the C:\ Drive after creation, however you will need to take this in to consideration if you are using any scripts/deployments etc that you require a larger than 30GB C:\ Drive. You can follow the following blog posts to expand the disk on the VM’s.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps solve a few mysteries as these base templates are changed!