Azure Managed Disk Types

Azure Managed Disks offer various disk types optimized for different performance and cost requirements. Choosing the right disk type is crucial for the performance and cost-effectiveness of your virtual machine workloads.

Overview of Managed Disk Types

Managed Disks simplify disk management by handling the underlying storage account. They are available in several performance tiers, each with unique characteristics:

• Ultra Disk

  Description: The highest performance disk offering. Designed for I/O intensive workloads such as SAP HANA, top-tier SQL Server, and other mission-critical applications requiring low latency and high IOPS/throughput.

  Performance: Extremely high IOPS and throughput, configurable per disk.

  Use Cases: High-performance databases, critical transactional workloads.

• Premium SSD (Premium SSD v2)** - *Newer, improved offering***

  Description: The next generation of Premium SSDs. Offers higher performance, sub-millisecond latency, and independent scaling of IOPS and throughput. Suitable for most production and development/test workloads.

  Performance: High IOPS and throughput, sub-millisecond latency.

  Use Cases: Production applications, dev/test environments, databases, VMs requiring consistent performance.

• Premium SSD

  Description: Solid State Drives (SSDs) that provide consistent and low latency I/O, along with high throughput. Ideal for I/O intensive workloads that require predictable performance.

  Performance: Good IOPS and throughput, low latency.

  Use Cases: Production workloads, databases, dev/test environments.

• Standard SSD

  Description: Solid State Drives (SSDs) that offer a cost-effective solution for workloads that require consistent latency at an unpredictable I/O rate, but still need lower latency than Standard HDD.

  Performance: Moderate IOPS and throughput, lower latency than Standard HDD.

  Use Cases: Web servers, lightly used applications, dev/test environments.

• Standard HDD

  Description: Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) providing the lowest cost for infrequent data access. Suitable for workloads where data is accessed infrequently and latency is not a primary concern.

  Performance: Lower IOPS and throughput, higher latency.

  Use Cases: Backup and restore, non-critical applications, disaster recovery, large data archives.

Choosing the Right Disk Type

Consider the following factors when selecting a disk type:

• Workload Type: What is the primary function of your VM? (e.g., database, web server, file server)
• Performance Requirements: What are the expected IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and throughput (MB/s) needs?
• Latency Sensitivity: How critical is low latency for your application?
• Cost: Budgetary constraints will heavily influence your choice.

Performance Benchmarks and Considerations

Each disk type has defined performance limits. It's crucial to understand these limits and monitor your VM's disk I/O to ensure optimal performance. You can also adjust disk performance on the fly for some types.

For detailed specifications on IOPS, throughput, and pricing for each disk type, please refer to the official Azure documentation.

# Example of how to create a Premium SSD Managed Disk using Azure CLI
az disk create --resource-group MyResourceGroup --name MyPremiumSSDDisk --sku Premium_LRS --size-gb 128 --zone 1