Microsoft have announced to customers of single zone (non availability zone) SKU VPN Gateways that they will be retired on the 16th of September 2026.

Microsoft has officially announced the retirement of its single zone VPN Gateway deployments, non-Availability Zone (non-AZ) SKUs, specifically VpnGw1–5. The retirement process will complete on September 16, 2026, when these SKUs will be automatically migrated to equivalent Availability Zone (AZ) SKUs.

Key Dates

The first critical date is December 31, 2024. After this date, creating new VPN gateways using VpnGw1–5 SKUs will no longer be possible. Next, beginning on January 1, 2025, Microsoft will lower the pricing on AZ SKUs to ease the transition for customers. Finally, on September 16, 2026, any existing VPN gateways on VpnGw1–5 SKUs will be automatically migrated to the equivalent AZ SKUs.

Why is this happening?

The retirement of the non-AZ SKUs stems the fact that these SKUs lack redundancy and do not offer the same level of fault tolerance as their AZ counterparts. This is because they don’t leverage Azure’s Availability Zones, which are designed to minimise downtime by deploying nodes across availability zones within an Azure region.

This brings the VPN gateway more inline with resources such as Application Gateway V2, Azure Firewall, Bastion and NAT Gateway which all are available across availability zones.

To encourage adoption of the AZ SKUs, Microsoft is reducing their pricing starting January 1, 2025. This move aims to make the migration more cost-effective for users.

Impact

The announcement has immediate and long-term implications. After December 31, 2024, you will not be able to create new VPN gateways using the retiring SKUs. On September 16, 2026, any existing VPN gateways on these SKUs will be automatically migrated to AZ SKUs. While Microsoft intends for this migration to be seamless, it’s advisable to be aware and diligent of the migration.

For further reading directly from Microsoft: Retirement: VpnGw1-5 (Non-AZ SKUs) will be retired on Sep 30, 2026 – gateways will be automatically migrated to AZ SKUs  (microsoft.com)

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