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Azure Local VM Hydration & Reconnect

Azure Local VM Hydration — Revive. Reconnect. Reclaim.

Revive. Reconnect. Reclaim.

Private Preview

This tooling is based on Microsoft's Private Preview VM Reconnection feature for Azure Local. Scripts and procedures are subject to change as the feature moves toward general availability.

PowerShell automation for two related Azure Local VM operations:

VM Hydration

Takes an existing, unmanaged Hyper-V VM running on an Azure Local cluster and brings it under Azure Local management — without re-imaging, Sysprepping, or disrupting the workload.

The VM becomes a Microsoft.AzureStackHCI/virtualMachineInstances resource, fully manageable from the Azure portal, with lifecycle operations (start/stop, disk attach, extensions, policy).

  • Module cmdlet: Invoke-VMHydration
  • Standalone script: scripts/Invoke-VMHydration.ps1

VM Reconnect

Reconnects an Azure Local VM to its Azure resource after the VM has been restored to a different Azure Local cluster (e.g. via Veeam backup restore, export/import). The Azure resource becomes orphaned after such a restore; this tooling re-projects it onto the destination cluster.

  • Module cmdlet: Invoke-VMReconnect
  • Standalone script: scripts/Invoke-VMReconnect.ps1

Two Ways to Use This Repo

Install from PSGallery — works anywhere PowerShell 7 is available:

Install-Module AzureLocalVMHydration -Scope CurrentUser

Full module reference, parameters, and examples: Module Reference

Standalone Scripts

No install required — dot-source helpers and run directly on a cluster node. Full usage: Getting Started

What "Hydration" Means

In this context, hydration refers to registering a locally-hosted VHD/VHDX file as an Azure-managed disk resource — making it visible and manageable in Azure without moving the data. This is the core operation that underpins both scenarios above.

The term comes from Microsoft's own naming of the underlying CLI command: az stack-hci-vm disk create-from-local.