Questions related to Retirement Notice: Transition to Batch Spot VMs before 30 September 2025

Hello Karthick Narendran,

Please find answers to your questions below:

1. How can we confirm now that our pools are now using Spot VMs and not Low priority VMs?
Azure is still using the older naming convention for the VMs in the Azure Portal (possibly for backward compatibility) due to which this confusion might have arisen to confirm if VMs are Spot or still Low priority VMs in the new batch account.

To confirm you can use below Azure CLI command to verify:

az batch pool show 
--account-name <your-batch-account-name> 
--account-endpoint "https://<your-batch-account-name>.<region>.batch.azure.com" 
--pool-id <your-pool-id> 
--query "{PoolID:id, VMSize:vmSize, SpotNodes:scaleSettings.targetLowPriorityNodes}"

reference article : https://free.blessedness.top/en-us/azure/batch/low-priority-vms-retirement-migration-guide#to-ensure-the-migration-is-correctly-applied

2. Setting the pool allocation mode to "User Subscription" is the only change required to support this retirement or are there any additional changes required?
Yes, the primary change is indeed to set the pool allocation mode to "User Subscription", apart from some pre-requisites that come along with User Subscription mode such as Accept Legal terms, Allow Batch to access the subscription, key vault, designated authentication method while creating batch account, etc as listed out here: https://free.blessedness.top/en-us/azure/batch/batch-account-create-portal#configure-user-subscription-mode.

Given the fact that you have already created a new batch account with User Subscription mode so you should already be done with these steps.

3. Azure Batch accounts in User Subscription mode support only Entra ID authentication (not shared key), and the Python SDK that supports Entra is in version 15.0.0 which is currently in beta. Can you confirm when is the stable version expected?

There is no ETA yet for stable version for Python SDK for Entra support and yes the version that supports Entra is 15.0.0. Right now, the last pre-release version (15.0.0b2) was from Apr 2025.
At this point, we only can file an issue on the repository (https://github.com/Azure/azure-sdk-for-python/issues) to notify the maintainers and get it prioritized.

Let me know if my response helped clear things up, or if you have any other questions.