Good new, the long awaited UEFI-based boot support for Azure virtual machine is now available in preview.
The UEFI-based boot support was added to on-premises Hyper-V since Windows Server 2012 R2, quite long time ago and since then we have been waiting for this on Azure.
The new generation (aka generation 2) of Azure virtual machine introduces this support alongside of:
- support of up to 12 Tb storage
- support for OS disk size up to 2Tb
- and off course, support of SecureBoot and vTPM (virtual trusted platform module)
Unfortunately, the support for VHDX is still not there.
This new capability is available for Windows Server 2012/2012R2/2016/2019 Datacenter image on the marketplace (listed as 2012/2012-r2/2016/2019-datacenter-gen2
Complete list of support and limitations is available here https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/generation-2 (side note, it seems the documentation is not completely correct at the time of writing as SecureBoot and vTPM are still listed as unsupported).