Managed Disks Overview
Azure Managed Disks is a resource management feature that simplifies managing your virtual machine (VM) disks. When you use Managed Disks, Azure handles disk account management for you. You don't need to manage the storage accounts for the VM disks. You only need to manage the disks themselves. This feature is designed to simplify disk management and improve reliability.
What are Managed Disks?
Managed Disks are Azure storage resources that are used to store the disks for Azure virtual machines. They are used for operating system disks, data disks, and boot diagnostics for Azure VMs.
With Managed Disks, you don't have to worry about managing storage accounts. Azure manages the storage infrastructure, including the physical disks, for your Managed Disks. This allows you to focus on your VM deployment and management without the overhead of managing underlying storage accounts.
Key Benefits of Managed Disks
- Simplified Management: Azure handles the provisioning and management of underlying storage for your disks.
- High Availability and Durability: Managed Disks offer higher availability and durability compared to unmanaged disks. They are stored in Azure Storage and benefit from Azure's built-in redundancy.
- Scalability: Easily scale your disk storage up or down as your needs change without complex configurations.
- Performance Tiers: Choose from different performance tiers (Standard HDD, Standard SSD, Premium SSD, Ultra Disk) to match your application's performance requirements and cost objectives.
- Snapshots and Backups: Easily create disk snapshots for backup and disaster recovery purposes.
- Encryption: Managed Disks are encrypted at rest by default using Azure Storage Service Encryption.
Types of Managed Disks
Azure offers several types of Managed Disks, each with different performance characteristics and cost considerations:
- Standard HDD: Low-cost, reliable disk storage for workloads that require infrequent access and are not sensitive to latency.
- Standard SSD: Cost-effective disk storage for workloads that require consistent latency and higher throughput than HDD, such as development and test environments.
- Premium SSD: High-performance, low-latency disk storage for I/O-intensive workloads, such as production applications and databases.
- Ultra Disk: The highest-performance storage offering, designed for workloads that require extremely high throughput, IOPS, and low latency, such as SAP HANA or top-tier databases.
How Managed Disks Work
When you create a virtual machine with Managed Disks, Azure automatically creates the necessary storage resources in the background. Each Managed Disk is a separate Azure resource, making it easier to manage and attach to VMs.
You can create Managed Disks independently and then attach them to your VMs. This separation allows for more flexible storage configurations.
Creating a VM with Managed Disks
When you create a VM in the Azure portal, you will be prompted to choose between Managed Disks and unmanaged disks. It is recommended to always choose Managed Disks for new deployments.
# Example using Azure CLI to create a VM with Managed Disks
az vm create \
--resource-group MyResourceGroup \
--name MyVM \
--image Ubuntu2204 \
--admin-username azureuser \
--admin-password mysecretpassword \
--data-disk-types StandardSSD_LRS \
--os-disk-size-gb 128
Migrating to Managed Disks
If you have existing VMs using unmanaged disks, you can migrate them to Managed Disks. Azure provides tools and procedures to help with this migration process, typically involving disk conversion and VM redeployment.