How to upgrade an azure VM? I have a VM in azure. As I was looking at the bill I realized it is not an RI - Reserved instance. With a reserved instance prices can be half to a third. So I wanted to convert this VM to a 3 year reserved instance. By their cost calculator that will come to about 300 dollars for 3 years.

However when I tried to upgrade the VM (They call it resize), I have realized this is an older VM and I am not able to reserve it for 3 years. So this article goes into how to find a suitable VM that can be reserved for 3 years and how do I migrate my OS disk and the data to this new VM

In addition the VHD (hard disk) I had seemed to be a nonmanaged disk. I needed to convert that to a managed disk as well. this article will go into that as well with some useful reads from microsoft azure site.