Microsoft Security Advisory: Standard_NVads_A10_v5 Azure virtual machines (VMs)

On 30 September 2026, NVIDIA published a security bulletin identifying security vulnerabilities affecting the A10 and RTX PRO 6000 BSE GPU-based VMs. No other NVIDIA GPUs and Azure products were in scope for these particular security vulnerabilities.

The security vulnerabilities NVIDIA disclosed are considered to be among the highest severity, and posed meaningful risk to the security of everyone's VMs. Due to this, the Azure maintenance on NVadsA10_v5 that was first announced in August and concluded this past weekend was mandatory. The security vulnerabilities have now been patched across the entire Azure fleet of NVadsA10_v5 in the host driver.

Required action

Azure is making available security patched guest drivers, v19.6 and v20.2, for NVadsA10_v5 VMs, found for both Windows and Linux at the following links:

• Azure N-series NVIDIA GPU driver setup for Windows - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn
• Azure N-series GPU driver setup for Linux - Azure Virtual Machines | Microsoft Learn

Microsoft will only be offering and supporting these drivers going forward. Using any other drivers is unsupported by both Microsoft and NVIDIA and Microsoft strongly recommends against it.