Azure Documentation

Azure Managed Disks Overview

Understand the benefits, features, and architecture of Azure Managed Disks for your virtual machines.

What are Azure Managed Disks?

Azure Managed Disks are a storage solution for Azure virtual machines (VMs). Instead of managing the underlying storage accounts yourself, Azure handles the storage infrastructure for you. This includes resource availability, maintenance, and scaling.

Managed Disks simplify storage management and offer several benefits:

  • Simplified Management: Azure handles all storage account management, including provisioning, replication, and patching.
  • High Availability: Managed Disks are designed for high availability, with data replicated across multiple storage nodes within an availability set or zone.
  • Scalability: Easily scale your disk capacity and performance as your needs grow.
  • Cost-Effectiveness: Pay only for the capacity you provision, with various performance tiers to optimize costs.
  • Security: Enhanced security features, including encryption at rest and in transit.

Key Concepts

Managed Disks abstract the underlying storage complexity. Here are some key components:

Disk Types

Azure Managed Disks offer different performance and cost characteristics:

  • Ultra Disk: For I/O-intensive workloads requiring very high throughput and IOPS.
  • Premium SSD: For production and development workloads that require low latency and high throughput.
  • Standard SSD: For workloads that require consistent performance at an affordable price, such as dev/test, web servers, and small to medium databases.
  • Standard HDD: For backup, non-critical, and disaster recovery scenarios where cost is the primary driver.

Disk Operations

Common operations include:

  • Creating a disk
  • Attaching a disk to a VM
  • Detaching a disk from a VM
  • Resizing a disk
  • Taking snapshots
  • Creating a disk from a snapshot or VHD

Benefits of Managed Disks

Managed Disks offer a significant improvement over unmanaged disks:

  • No More Storage Account Management: Eliminate the complexity of managing storage accounts, their availability, and scale. Azure handles this automatically.
  • Improved Reliability: Managed Disks benefit from Azure's built-in redundancy and fault tolerance mechanisms.
  • Streamlined VM Deployment: Simpler VM creation and management when disks are managed.
  • Granular Control: You can configure storage settings at the disk level, allowing for fine-tuned performance and cost optimization.

Architecture

Each Managed Disk is a distinct Azure resource. When you create a Managed Disk, Azure provisions the underlying storage in a storage account that it manages. You interact with the disk as a resource object, abstracting the actual storage details.

For learning more, consider these related topics:

Example: Creating a Managed Disk (Conceptual)

While this is a conceptual overview, creating a managed disk typically involves specifying:


{
  "name": "myManagedDisk",
  "location": "eastus",
  "sku": {
    "name": "Premium_LRS"
  },
  "properties": {
    "creationData": {
      "createOption": "Empty"
    },
    "diskSizeGB": 128
  }
}

Next Steps

Now that you have a foundational understanding of Azure Managed Disks, you can explore: