Azure Data Science Virtual Machine release notes

In this article, learn about Azure Data Science Virtual Machine releases. For a full list of tools included, along with version numbers, check out this page.

Due to the rapidly evolving needs and packages updates, we target to release new Azure Data Science Virtual Machine for Windows and Ubuntu images every month.

Azure portal users will always find the latest image available for provisioning the Data Science Virtual Machine. For CLI or Azure Resource Manager (ARM) users, we keep images of individual versions available for 12 months. After that period, particular version of image is no longer available for provisioning.

See the list of known issues to learn about known bugs and workarounds.

December 20, 2023

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 23.12.18

Main changes:

  • numpy version 1.22.3
  • pytz version 2022.6
  • torch version 1.12.0
  • certifi version 2023.7.2
  • azure-mgmt-network to version 25.1.0
  • scikit-learn version 1.0.2
  • scipy version 1.9.2
  • accuracy
  • pickle5
  • pillow version 10.1.0
  • experimental
  • ipykernel version 6.14.0
  • en_core_web_sm

December 18, 2023

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version 23.12.11

Main changes:

  • SDK 1.54.0
  • numba
  • Scipy
  • azure-core to version 1.29.4
  • azure-identity to version 1.14.0
  • azure-storage-queue to version 12.7.2

December 5, 2023

DSVM offering for Data Science VM – Windows 2022 is now generally available in the marketplace.

Version 23.11.23

Main changes:

  • SDK 1.54.0
  • numba
  • Scipy
  • azure-core to version 1.29.4
  • azure-identity to version 1.14.0
  • azure-storage-queue to version 12.7.2

July 26, 2023

New DSVM offering for Data Science VM – Windows 2022 (Preview) is currently live in the marketplace.

Version 23.06.25

Main changes:

  • SDK 1.51.0

April 26, 2023

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 23.04.24

Main changes:

  • SDK 1.50.0
  • Dotnet upgraded to 6.0 SDK
  • PyTorch GPU functionality fixed in `azureml_py38_PT_and_TF environment.
  • Blobfuse upgraded to blobfuse2

April 4, 2023

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version: 23.03.31

Main changes:

  • SDK 1.49
  • Cuda drivers upgraded to 11.4
  • PyTorch GPU functionality fixed on azureml_py38 and azureml_py28_PT_and_TF environments
  • Dotnet upgraded to 6.0

January 10, 2023

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version: 23.01.06

Main changes:

  • Added R package "ranger"
  • Pinned pandas==1.1.5 and numpy==1.23.0 in azureml_py38 environment

November 30, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version: 22.11.25

Main changes:

  • Azure Machine Learning SDK V2 samples included
  • Ray to version 2.0.0
  • Added clock, recipes R packages
  • azureml-core to version 1.47.0
  • azure-ai-ml to version 1.1.1

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version: 22.11.27

Main changes:

  • Azure Machine Learning SDK V2 samples included
  • RScirpt environment path alignment
  • Ray version 2.0.0 package added to azureml_py38 and azureml_py38_PT_TF environments.
  • azureml-core to version 1.47.0
  • azure-ai-ml to version 1.1.1

September 20, 2022

Announcement: Starting October 1, 2022, Ubuntu 18 DSVM will not be available on the marketplace. We recommend users switch to Ubuntu 20 DSVM as we continue to ship updates/patches on our latest Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Users that are using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template/virtual machine scale set to deploy the Ubuntu DSVM machines, should configure:

Offer SKU
ubuntu-2004 2004 for Gen1 or 2004-gen2 for Gen2 VM sizes

Instead of:

Offer SKU
ubuntu-1804 1804 for Gen1 or 1804-gen2 for Gen2 VM sizes

Note: There is no impact to existing customers who are still on Ubuntu-18 DSVM as of our October 2022 update. However, the deprecation plan is scheduled for December 2022. We recommend that you switch to Ubuntu-20 DSVM at your earliest convenience.

September 19, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.09.19

Main changes:

  • .NET Framework to version 3.1.423
  • Azure Cli to version 2.40.0
  • Intelijidea to version 2022.2.2
  • Microsoft Edge Browser to version 107.0.1379.1
  • Nodejs to version v16.17.0
  • Pycharm to version 2022.2.1

Environment Specific Updates:

azureml_py38:

  • azureml-core to version 1.45.0

py38_default:

  • Jupyter Lab to version 3.4.7
  • azure-core to version 1.25.1
  • keras to version 2.10.0
  • tensorflow-gpu to version 2.10.0

September 12, 2022

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version 22.09.06

Main changes:

  • Base OS level image updates.

August 16, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.08.11

Main changes:

  • Jupyterlab upgraded to version 3.4.5
  • matplotlib, azureml-mlflow added to sdkv2 environment.
  • Jupyterhub spawner reconfigured to root environment.

July 28, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.07.19

Main changes:

  • Updated Azure Cli to version 2.38.0
  • Updated Nodejs to version v16.16.0
  • Updated Scala to version 2.12.15
  • Updated Spark to version 3.2.2
  • MMLSpark notebook features v0.10.0
  • 4 additional R libraries: janitor, skimr, palmerpenguins and doParallel
  • Added new Azure Machine Learning Environment azureml_310_sdkv2

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version 22.07.18

Main Changes:

  • General OS level updates.

July 11, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 18.04 and Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.07.08

Main changes:

  • Minor bug fixes.

June 28, 2022

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019 and Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.06.10

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 18.04

Version 22.06.13

Main changes:

  • Remove Rstudio software tool from DSVM images.

May 17, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.05.11

Main changes:

  • Upgraded log4j(v2) to version 2.17.2

April 29, 2022

Data Science VM – Ubuntu 18.04 and Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04

Version 22.04.27

Main changes:

  • Plotly and summarytools R studio extensions runtime import fix.
  • Cudatoolkit and CUDNN upgraded to 13.1 and 2.8.1 respectively.
  • Fix Python 3.8 - Azure Machine Learning notebook run, pinned matplotlib to 3.2.1 and cycler to 0.11.0 packages in Azureml_py38 environment.

April 26, 2022

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version: 22.04.21

Main changes:

  • Plotly R studio extension patch.
  • Update Rscript env path to support latest R studio version 4.1.3.

April 14, 2022

New DSVM offering for Data Science VM – Ubuntu 20.04 is currently live in the marketplace.

Version: 22.04.05

April 04, 2022

New Image for Data Science VM – Ubuntu 18.04

Version: 22.04.01

Main changes:

  • Updated R environment - added libraries: Cluster, Devtools Factoextra, GlueHere, Ottr, Paletteer, Patchwork, Plotly, Rmd2jupyter, Scales, Statip, Summarytools, Tidyverse, Tidymodels and Testthat
  • Further Log4j vulnerability mitigation - although not used, we moved all log4j to version v2, we have removed old log4j jars1.0 and moved log4j version 2.0 jars.
  • Azure CLI to version 2.33.1
  • Fixed jupyterhub access issue using public ip address
  • Redesign of Conda environments - we're continuing with alignment and refining the Conda environments so we created:
    • azureml_py38: environment based on Python 3.8 with preinstalled Azure Machine Learning SDK containing also AutoML environment
    • azureml_py38_PT_TF: additional azureml_py38 environment, preinstalled with latest TensorFlow and PyTorch
    • py38_default: default system environment based on Python 3.8
    • We have removed azureml_py36_tensorflow, azureml_py36_pytorch, py38_tensorflow and py38_pytorch environments.

March 18, 2022

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version: 22.03.09

Main changes:

  • Updated R environment - added libraries: Cluster, Devtools Factoextra, GlueHere, Ottr, Paletteer, Patchwork, Plotly, Rmd2jupyter, Scales, Statip, Summarytools, Tidyverse, Tidymodels and Testthat
  • Further Log4j vulnerability mitigation - although not used, we moved all log4j to version v2, we have removed old log4j jars1.0 and moved log4j version 2.0 jars.
  • Azure CLI to version 2.33.1
  • Redesign of Conda environments - we're continuing with alignment and refining the Conda environments so we created:
    • azureml_py38: environment based on Python 3.8 with preinstalled Azure Machine Learning SDK containing also AutoML environment
    • azureml_py38_PT_TF: complementary environment azureml_py38 with preinstalled with latest TensorFlow and PyTorch
    • py38_default: default system environment based on Python 3.8
    • we removed azureml_py36_tensorflow, azureml_py36_pytorch, py38_tensorflow and py38_pytorch environments.

March 9, 2022

Data Science Virtual Machine - Windows 2019

Version: 21.12.03

Windows 2019 DSVM will now be supported under publisher: microsoft-dsvm, offer ID: dsvm-win-2019, plan ID/SKU ID: winserver-2019

Users using Azure Resource Manager (ARM) template / virtual machine scale set to deploy the Windows DSVM machines, should configure the SKU with winserver-2019 instead of server-2019, since we'll continue to ship updates to Windows DSVM images on the new SKU from March, 2022.

December 3, 2021

New image for Windows Server 2019.

Version: 21.12.03

Main changes:

  • Updated pytorch to version 1.10.0
  • Updated tensorflow to version 2.7.0
  • Fix for Azure Machine Learning SDK & AutoML environment
  • Windows Security update
  • Improvement of stability and minor bug fixes

November 4, 2021

New image for Ubuntu 18.04.

Version: 21.11.04

Main changes:

  • Changed .NET Framework to version 3.1.414
  • Changed Azcopy to version 10.13.0
  • Changed Azure CLI to version 2.30.0
  • Changed CUDA to version 11.5
  • Changed Docker to version 20.10.10
  • Changed Intellijidea to version 2021.2.3
  • Changed NVIDIA Drivers to version 470.103.01
  • Changed NVIDIA SMI to version 470.103.01
  • Changed Nodejs to version v16.13.0
  • Changed Pycharm to version 2021.2.3
  • Changed VS Code to version 1.61.2
  • Conda
    • azureml_py36_automl
      • Changed azureml-core to version 1.35.0
    • py38_default
      • Changed Jupyter Lab / jupyterlab to version 3.2.1
      • Changed Jupyter Notebook / notebook to version 6.4.5
      • Changed Jupyter Server / jupyter_server to version 1.11.2
      • Changed PyTorch Profiler TensorBoard Plugin / torch-tb-profiler to version 0.3.1
      • Changed azure-core to version 1.19.1
      • Changed matplotlib to version 3.4.3
      • Changed mkl to version 2021.4.0
      • Changed onnx to version 1.10.2
      • Changed opencv-python to version 4.5.4.58
      • Changed pandas to version 1.3.4
      • Changed pytorch to version 1.10.0
      • Changed scikit-learn to version 1.0.1
      • Changed tensorflow-gpu to version 2.6.2

October 7, 2021

New image for Ubuntu 18.04.

Version: 21.10.07

Main changes:

  • Changed pytorch to version 1.9.1
  • Changed Docker to version 20.10.9
  • Changed Intellijidea to version 2021.2.2
  • Changed Nodejs to version v14.18.0
  • Changed Pycharm to version 2021.2.2
  • Changed VS Code to version 1.60.2
  • Fixed AutoML environment (azureml_py36_automl)
  • Fixed Azure Storage Explorer stability
  • Improvement of stability and minor bug fixes

August 11, 2021

New image for Windows Server 2019.

Version: 21.08.11

Main changes:

  • Windows Security update
  • Update of Nvidia CuDNN to 8.1.0
  • Update of Jupyter Lab -to 3.0.16
  • Added MLFLow for experiment tracking
  • Improvement of stability and minor bug fixes

July 12, 2021

New image for Ubuntu 18.04.

Main changes:

  • Updated to PyTorch 1.9.0
  • Updated Azure CLI to 2.26.1
  • Updated Azure CLI Azure Machine Learning extension to 1.29.0
  • Update VS Code version 1.58.1
  • Improvement of stability and minor bug fixes

June 22, 2021

New image for Windows Server 2019.

Version: 21.06.22

Main changes:

  • Updated to PyTorch 1.9.0
  • Fixed a bug where git wasn't available

June 1, 2021

New image for Ubuntu 18.04.

Version: 21.06.01

Main changes are:

  • Docker is enabled by default
  • JupyterHub is using JupyterLab by default
  • Updated Python versions to fix CVE-2020-15523
  • Updated IntelliJ IDEA to version 2021.1 to fix CVE-2021-25758
  • Updated PyCharm Community to 2021.1
  • Updated TensorFlow to version 2.5.0

Removed several icons from desktop.

May 22, 2021

New image for Windows Server 2019.

Version: 21.05.22

Selected version updates are:

  • CUDA 11.1
  • Python 3.8
  • PyTorch 1.8.1
  • TensorFlow 2.5.0
  • Spark 3.1.1
  • Java 11
  • R 4.1.0
  • Julia 1.0.5
  • NodeJS 16.2.0
  • Visual Studio Code 1.56.2 incl. Azure Machine Learning extension
  • PyCharm Community Edition 2021.1.1
  • Jupyter Lab 2.2.6
  • RStudio 1.4.1106
  • Visual Studio Community Edition 2019 (version 16.9.6)
  • Azure CLI 2.23.0
  • Storage Explorer 1.19.1
  • AzCopy 10.10.0
  • Power BI Desktop 2.93.641.0 64-bit (May 2021)
  • Azure Data Studio 1.28.0
  • Microsoft Edge browser

Removed Firefox, Apache Drill and Microsoft Integration Runtime.
Dark mode, changed icons on desktop, wallpaper background change.

May 12, 2021

New image for Ubuntu 18.04.

Selected version updates are:

  • CUDA 11.3, cuDNN 8, NCCL2
  • Python 3.8
  • R 4.0.5
  • Spark 3.1 incl. mmlspark, connectors to Blob Storage, Data Lake, Azure Cosmos DB
  • Java 11 (OpenJDK)
  • Jupyter Lab 3.0.14
  • PyTorch 1.8.1 incl. torchaudio torchtext torchvision, torch-tb-profiler
  • TensorFlow 2.4.1 incl. TensorBoard
  • dask 2021.01.0
  • VS.Code 1.56
  • Azure Data Studio 1.22.1
  • Azure CLI 2.23.0
  • Azure Storage Explorer 1.19.1
  • azcopy 10.10
  • Microsoft Edge browser (beta)

Added docker. To save resources, the docker service isn't started by default. To start the docker service, run the following command-line commands:
sudo systemctl start docker

Note

If your machine has GPU(s), you can make use of the GPU(s) inside the containers by adding a --gpus parameter to your docker command.

For example, running

sudo docker run --gpus all -it --rm -v local_dir:container_dir nvcr.io/nvidia/pytorch:18.04-py3

will run an Ubuntu 18.04 container with PyTorch pre-installed and all GPUs enabled. It will also make a local folder local_dir available in the container under container_dir.

February 24, 2020

Data Science Virtual Machine images for Ubuntu 18.04 and Windows 2019 images are now available.

October 8, 2019

Updates to software on the Windows DSVM

  • Azure Storage Explorer 1.10.1
  • Power BI Desktop 2.73.55xx
  • Firefox 69.0.2
  • PyCharm 19.2.3
  • RStudio 1.2.50xx

Default Browser for Windows updated

Earlier, the default browser was set to Internet Explorer. Users are now prompted to choose a default browser when they first sign in.