Upgrading Azure hosted SLES 15 VM from v5 to v6 SKUs

The new v6 and v7 family Azure hardware is now broadly available, with plenty of capacity in the various regions.

The biggest changes are to network and storage drivers, moving to use the Microsoft MANA interface for network fabric, and a switch from SCSI to NVMe for disk.

Unlike previous SKU updates, e.g. v3 to v5, this family update requires some planning, especially on the Linux side.

There is a great PowerShell script to assist with the switch, which automates much of the roll forward, and provides a roll back as well.

In testing I found that two additional checks made this work flawlessly:

1. Ensure the latest Azure VM tools are are installed (azure-vm-utils)
2. Ensure the nvme drivers are installed (modprobe, dracut.conf)

Usual disclaimers before doing this – ensure you have a backup of your Linux VM before this work, you could be left with a somewhat broken VM. The rollback script works well.