Azure Managed Disks Documentation

Introduction to Azure Managed Disks

Azure Managed Disks are a more robust and scalable solution for managing virtual machine disks. They abstract away the complexities of storage accounts and offer a variety of performance tiers to meet your application's demands. Managed Disks are highly available and durable, making them the recommended approach for all Azure VM storage.

Key benefits include:

High Availability: Disks are replicated within an availability zone or region.
Scalability: Easily scale disk performance and capacity.
Simplified Management: Azure handles storage account provisioning and management.
Security: Built-in encryption at rest and support for customer-managed keys.

Azure Managed Disk Types

Azure offers several types of managed disks, each suited for different workloads:

Standard HDD

Best for: Development/test workloads, non-critical applications, and backup scenarios where low cost is a priority.

Features: Lowest cost, high capacity, suitable for sequential I/O.

Learn more about Standard HDD

Standard SSD

Best for: Web servers, lightly trafficked applications, and development/test environments requiring more consistent performance than HDD.

Features: Consistent latency, good throughput, cost-effective for moderate workloads.

Learn more about Standard SSD

Premium SSD

Best for: Mission-critical applications, production workloads, and I/O-intensive applications demanding high performance and low latency.

Features: High throughput, low latency, excellent reliability, available in various performance tiers.

Learn more about Premium SSD

Ultra Disk

Best for: I/O-intensive, mission-critical workloads requiring extremely high IOPS and throughput with tunable performance.

Features: Highest performance, customizable IOPS/throughput, ideal for top-tier enterprise applications.

Learn more about Ultra Disk

Key Features of Managed Disks

Disk Encryption: Data at rest is encrypted by default using Azure Storage Service Encryption. Support for Customer-Managed Keys (CMK) and Azure Disk Encryption.
Availability Zones: Deploy disks across availability zones for resilience.
Snapshots: Create point-in-time backups of your disks.
Disk Backup: Use Azure Backup for automated and managed backup solutions.
Resource Health: Monitor the health of your disks.
Shared Disks: Allow multiple VMs to attach to the same managed disk simultaneously (for clustered applications).

Common Use Cases

Operating system disks for Azure VMs.
Data disks for applications requiring high IOPS and throughput.
Databases (SQL Server, MySQL, PostgreSQL).
Application servers (web servers, enterprise applications).
Big data and analytics workloads.
Backup and disaster recovery solutions.

Creating Managed Disks

Managed Disks can be created using various Azure tools:

Azure Portal

Visually create and configure disks through the Azure portal interface.

Step-by-step guide in Azure Portal

Azure CLI

Use the command-line interface for scripting and automation.

az disk create --resource-group <resource-group-name> --name <disk-name> --sku StandardSSD_LRS --size-gb 128

Azure CLI documentation for disks

Azure PowerShell

Leverage PowerShell cmdlets for disk management.

New-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName <resource-group-name> -DiskName <disk-name> -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128 -SkuName StandardSSD_LRS

Azure PowerShell documentation for disks

ARM Templates

Define your disk infrastructure as code.

Example ARM template for Managed Disks

Managing Managed Disks

Key operations for managing your disks:

Resizing Disks

Adjust the size and performance of your managed disks without downtime for certain operations.

How to resize managed disks

Creating Disk Snapshots

Create point-in-time copies of your disks for backup and disaster recovery.

Learn about managed disk snapshots

Cloning Disks

Create new disks from existing disks or snapshots.

Cloning managed disks

Disk Encryption

Configure encryption settings, including Azure default encryption and CMK.

Understand Azure disk encryption

Performance Considerations

Understand the IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second) and throughput for each disk type. Performance scales with disk size, especially for Premium SSD and Ultra Disks. Monitor disk performance using Azure Monitor for optimal resource utilization and cost management.

Key metrics to consider:

IOPS (Operations per second)
Throughput (MB/s)
Latency (ms)

Deep dive into Azure Disk Performance

Pricing for Managed Disks

Pricing for managed disks is based on the disk type, provisioned capacity, and IOPS/throughput for Ultra Disks. Consider the cost of snapshots and backup as well.

View Azure Managed Disks Pricing