Advantages of installing a newer build agent?
We have an on-prem Azure DevOps server (2020 update 1.2). All our builds use the "default" agent (v2.181.2) created when DevOps was installed. I'm aware that it is possible to download and install agents from here: https://github.com/microsoft/azure-pipelines-agent/releases, but what are the reasons for doing so? Are they merely to provide bug fixes and performance improvements, rather than (say) new build tasks or build task features (which I assume are part and parcel of DevOps itself, and have nothing to do with agents)? One of the reasons I ask is that last year I tried installing a new agent (v2.210.1), and builds had been working fine. However we recently started seeing our builds taking a long time, and in the agent log found that the agent was repeatedly attempting to downgrade to v2.181.2. Why was this? Is something limiting which version we can use, e.g. the version of DevOps itself, or a particular task in the build definition? (The build did continue to work when I reconfigured it to use the default agent, v2.181.2, which is coincidentally what the newer agent was trying to downgrade to). I assume I would get similar issues if I was to create an agent using the latest version (currently v3.227.2)? Like I say, curious to know why I would want to install a newer agent in the first place.
Move on-prem environment to Azure migration
Hi there, I'm working on a customer with a traditional Windows AD domain. The customer wants to have all their Windows VMs (now running on VMWare) to Azure. For the clients we recently managed to make all devices Azure AD Joined only. M365 suite is used for Teams/SharePoint/ExchangeOnline, Defender for endpoint and Endpointmanager for client management. We have no domain joined computers anymore. All the users are still in Azure AD Connect that syncs to Azure AD. Printers are on universal print and files to Teams/SharePoint. We now have a large file share that we could not migrate to sharepoint. We would like to have this on Azure Files. Right now we are in the start of creating an Azure subscription. What should be the best route to take for this? On-prem there are a couple Windows (apps) VMs that we would like to 'lift and shift' to Azure. These app servers are used for legacy/history checking... If there is any clear path or documentation that we can consult, would like to know. Thanks in advance!