Introduction to Azure Storage Disks

Welcome to the comprehensive guide on Azure Storage Disks. This section provides an foundational understanding of how Azure Managed Disks work and their critical role in supporting virtual machine workloads.

What are Azure Managed Disks?

Azure Managed Disks are a feature that simplifies storage account management for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Instead of managing the underlying storage account and its associated virtual disks (VHDs), Azure takes care of provisioning, managing, and scaling the storage for you. This abstraction layer significantly reduces the operational overhead associated with managing VM disks.

Key benefits of Managed Disks include:

Simplified Management: No need to manage storage accounts for your VM disks. Azure handles availability, redundancy, and scaling.
High Availability: Managed Disks are designed for high availability, with data replicated within a storage scale unit to ensure durability and uptime.
Scalability: Easily scale your disk capacity and performance without manual intervention.
Security: Support for features like encryption at rest and in transit, along with access control mechanisms.

Core Concepts

Understanding these core concepts is essential for effectively using Azure Managed Disks:

Disk Types

Azure offers various disk types, each optimized for different performance and cost requirements. The primary types are:

Standard HDD: Cost-effective disks for non-critical, low-I/O workloads, batch processing, or archival.
Standard SSD: A balance between cost and performance, suitable for web servers, lightly used applications, and development/test environments.
Premium SSD: High-performance, low-latency SSDs designed for production workloads, including mission-critical applications, databases, and high-throughput scenarios.
Ultra Disk: The highest performance tier, offering configurable IOPS and throughput, ideal for the most demanding I/O-intensive workloads.

Disk Encryption

Azure Managed Disks support encryption at rest and in transit by default. You can leverage Azure Disk Encryption (ADE) to encrypt your OS and data disks using BitLocker for Windows or DM-Crypt for Linux. Encryption keys can be managed by Azure or by you using Azure Key Vault.

Snapshots and Images

Managed Disks facilitate powerful backup and disaster recovery capabilities through snapshots and images:

Snapshots: A point-in-time copy of a managed disk. Snapshots are incremental, meaning they only store the changes since the last snapshot, making them efficient for backup.
Images: A template that can be used to create new VM disks. You can create custom images from your existing VMs or use generalized images provided by Azure.

Important: Managed Disks are the recommended approach for storing data for Azure Virtual Machines. Unmanaged disks are deprecated and should be migrated to Managed Disks where possible.

Getting Started

To start using Azure Managed Disks, you typically:

Create a Virtual Machine, allowing Azure to provision Managed Disks automatically, or
Manually create Managed Disks and attach them to an existing or new Virtual Machine.

You can perform these actions using the Azure portal, Azure CLI, Azure PowerShell, or ARM templates.

Dive deeper into specific disk types, performance characteristics, and management best practices in the subsequent sections of this documentation.

Last updated: October 26, 2023