How many disks are used by VMs?

A VM can use three different disk such as: -

 Operating system storage.

 Temporary storage
 Data storage.

What is Operating system storage?

Every VM includes one disk that stores the operating system.

 This drive is registered as a SATA drive and labeled as the C: drive in Windows and mounted at
"/" in Unix-like operating systems.
 It has a maximum capacity of 4,095 gibibytes (GiB), and its content is taken from the VM image
you used to create the VM.

What is Temporary storage?

Every VM includes a temporary VHD that is used for page and swap files.

 Data on this drive may be lost during a maintenance event or redeployment.

 The drive is labeled as D: on a Windows VM by default.
 Do not use this drive to store important data that you do not want to lose.

What is Data storage?

A data disk is any other disk attached to a VM.

 You use data disks to store files, databases, and any other data that you need to persist across
reboots. Some VM images include data disks by default.
 You can also add additional data disks up to the maximum number specified by the size of the
VM.
 Each data disk is registered as a SCSI drive and has a max capacity of 32,767 GiB.
 You can choose drive letters or mount points for your data drives.

How to Store VHD files in the storage account?

In Azure, VHDs are stored in an Azure storage account as page blobs.

What is Disk performance?

The combination of these two determines how fast the disk is.

 IOPS: - The performance of your disks depends on the type of disk you chose. Each disk is rated
to a specific number of I/O operations per second, or IOPS (pronounced "eye-ops").
 Throughput rating: - each drive has a throughput rating - this determines how much data you
can read or write in a second.
For example, with standard storage, you get a maximum of 500 IOPS and 60 MB/second
throughput per disk (even on SSDs). With premium storage, the IOPS depends on the premium
disks you choose and the VM size.
VM size versus disk size

 The VM size you choose when you create your VM determines how many resources it can
allocate.
 The disk size controls the number of disks you can add to the VM and the maximum size of each
disk.
 Some VM sizes support only Standard storage drives - limiting the I/O performance. If you find
that you need more storage than what your VM size allows for, you can change the VM size.

What are Ephemeral OS disks?

An ephemeral OS disk is a virtual disk that saves data on the local virtual machine storage.

An ephemeral disk has faster read-and-write latency than a managed disk. It's also faster to reset the
image to the original boot state if you're using an ephemeral disk. However, an individual virtual
machine failure might destroy all the data on an ephemeral disk and leave the virtual machine unable to
boot. Because ephemeral disks reside locally to the host, they incur no storage costs and are free.

Ephemeral disks work well when you want to host a stateless workload, such as the business logic for a
multitier website or a micro service. Such applications are tolerant of individual virtual machine failures,
because requests can be rerouted to other virtual machines in the system. You can reset the failed
virtual machine to its original boot state rapidly and get it back up and running faster than if it used
managed disks.

What are Managed disks?

1. A managed disk is a virtual hard disk for which Azure manages the entire required physical
infrastructure.
2. Managed disks are easy to use. You can just provision them and attach them to virtual
machines.
3. Virtual hard disks in Azure are stored as page blobs in an Azure Storage account, but you don't
have to create storage accounts, blob containers, and page blobs yourself.

What are benefits of managed disks?

1. Simple scalability. You can create up to 50,000 managed disks of each type in each region in
your subscription.
2. High availability. Managed disks support 99.999% availability by storing data three times. If
there's a failure in one replica, the other two can maintain full read-write functionality.
3. Integration with availability sets and zones. If you place your virtual machines into an availability
set, Azure automatically distributes the managed disks for those machines into different fault
domains so that your machines are resilient to localized failures. You can also use availability
zones, which distribute data across multiple datacenters, for even greater availability.
4. Support for Azure Backup. Azure Backup natively supports managed disks, which includes
encrypted disks.
5. Granular access control. You can use Azure role-based access control (RBAC) to grant access to
specific user accounts for specific operations on a managed disk. For example, you could ensure
that only an administrator can delete a disk.
 6. Support for encryption. To protect sensitive data on a managed disk from unauthorized access,
you can encrypt it by using Azure Storage Service Encryption (SSE), which is provided with Azure
Storage accounts.
Alternatively, you can use Azure Disk Encryption (ADE), which uses BitLocker for Windows virtual
machines and DM-Crypt for Linux virtual machines.

What are unmanaged disks?

1. An unmanaged disk, like a managed disk, is stored as a page blob in an Azure Storage account.
The difference is that with unmanaged disks, you create and maintain this storage account
manually.
2. You have to keep track of IOPS limits within a storage account and ensures that you don't
overprovision throughput of your storage account.
3. You must also manage the security and RBAC access at the storage account level, instead of at
each individual disk with managed disks.
4. Unmanaged disks don't support all of the scalability and management features that you've seen
for managed disks, they're no longer widely used. Consider using them only if you want to
manually set up and manage the data for your virtual machine in the storage account.
5. In the portal, to use unmanaged disks, expand the Advanced section on the Disks page of the
Create a virtual machine wizard.

How to convert unmanaged disk to managed disk?

Originally, all virtual hard disks in Azure were unmanaged. If you're running an old virtual machine, it
might have unmanaged disks. You can convert those unmanaged disks to managed disks by using the

 ConvertTo-AzureRmVmManagedDisk PowerShell cmdlet.

 ConvertTo-AzureRmVMManagedDisk -ResourceGroupName MyResourceGroup -VMName
WebVm

How many disks available in the VM, when we create?

Ultra SSD

Ultra SSDs provide the highest disk performance available in Azure. Choose them when you need the
fastest storage performance, which includes high throughput, high IOPS, and low latency.

The performance of an Ultra SSD depends on the size you select.

Ultra disks can have capacities from 4 GB up to 64 TB. A unique feature of ultra disks is that you can
adjust the IOPS and throughput values while they're running and without detaching them from the host
virtual machine. Performance adjustments can take up to an hour to take effect.

What is limitation of Ultra SSD?

1. They're only available in a subset of Azure regions.

2. They can only be attached to virtual machines that are in availability zones.
3. They can only be attached to ES/DS v3 virtual machines.
4. They can only be used as data disks and can only be created as empty disks.
 5. They don't support disk snapshots, virtual machine images, scale sets, Azure Disk Encryption,
Azure Backup, or Azure Site Recovery.

Throughput
Disk size (GB) IOPS (MBps)
4 1,200 300
16 4,800 1,200
32 9,600 2,000
256 76,800 2,000
Over 1,024 160,000 2,000

What is Premium SSD?

Premium SSDs are the next tier down from ultra disks in terms of performance, but they still provide
high throughput and IOPS with low latency. Premium disks don't have the current limitations of ultra
disks. For example, they're available in all regions and can be used with virtual machines that are outside
of availability zones.

You can't adjust performance without detaching these disks from their virtual machine. Also, you can
only use premium SSDs with larger virtual machine sizes, which are compatible with premium storage.

This table has examples that illustrate the high performance of premium SSDs:

Throughput
Disk size name Disk size IOPS (MBps)
P4 32 GiB 120 25
P15 256 GiB 1,100 125
P40 2 TiB 7,500 250
P80 32 TiB 20,000 900

What is Standard SSD?

Standard SSDs in Azure are a cost-effective storage option for virtual machines that need consistent
performance at lower speeds. Standard SSDs aren't as fast as premium or ultra SSDs, but they still have
latencies in the range of 1 millisecond to 10 milliseconds and up to 6,000 IOPS. They're available to
attach to any virtual machine, no matter what size it is.

Use standard SSDs when you have budgetary constraints and a workload that isn't disk intensive. For
example, web servers, lightly used enterprise applications, and test servers can all run on standard SSDs.

This table has examples that illustrate the performance characteristics of standard SSDs in several sizes:

Disk size
Disk size name (GB) IOPS Throughput (MBps)
E4 32 120 25
E15 256 500 60
 E40 2,048 500 60
E80 32,767 6,000 750

Standard HDD

If you choose to use standard HDDs, data is stored on conventional magnetic disk drives with moving
spindles. Disks are slower and speeds are more variable than for SSDs, but latencies are under 10 ms for
write operations and 20 ms for reads. As for standard SSDs, you can use standard HDDs for any virtual
machine.

Use standard HDDs when you want to minimize costs for less critical workloads and development or test
environments.

This table illustrates the performance characteristics of standard HDDs in several sizes:

Throughput
Disk size name Disk size (GB) IOPS (MBps)
S4 32 500 60
S15 256 500 60
S40 2,048 500 60
S80 32,767 2,000 500