Available this week there is a new simplified and optimized storage option for your Azure virtual machine called managed disks. 

There are several advantages of managed disks vs. unmanaged disks with storage accounts. Here are a few:

• Elimination of manual Storage Account management for Azure VMs
• Quickly spin up a 1000 managed disks for up to 1000 VMs for large VM scale set cluster scenarios
• Easily convert from Standard (HDD) disk to a Premium (SSD) disk with just a VM reboot
• Point in time backups (snapshots) of your VM
• Bring your own VHD image using managed custom image with no storage account
• Granular delegation of control (RBAC) of the managed disks
• Can mix Premium and Standard managed disks without having to create separate storage accounts 

For more on Managed Disks pricing and features see here and FAQ here.

When you create a new Azure VM you get a new option called ‘managed disks’. See below for screenshots during VM creation:

 When prompted for VM storage, if you select No you are going to use an ‘unmanaged disk’ option and it will ask you create a Storage account. This is the legacy VM disk storage method and not recommended going forward.

 

To use managed disk, select Yes a ‘use managed disk’ option and this removes the Storage Account need for the VM:

 

Now you can add in additional SSD or HDD managed disks under the ‘Disks’ blade 

When adding in another managed disk you can add in Premium (SSD) or Standard (HDD) and size:

Premium (SSD) managed disk

Standard (HDD) managed disk

Opening the VM via RDP and initializing the disk you can now see the additional 1TB managed disk: 

I

If you would rather create a VM using managed disks via PowerShell see here.

To add in attached managed disks to an existing VM via PowerShell you can use New-AzureRmDiskConfig cmdlet:

note: you need to install Azure PowerShell 3.5 or higher to run these new cmdlets

$rgName = ‘EngineeringDeptRG’
$vmName = ‘server05’
$location = ‘West Central US’
$storageType = ‘PremiumLRS’
$dataDiskName = ($virtualMachineName + ‘_datadisk1’)

$diskConfig = New-AzureRmDiskConfig -AccountType $storageType -Location $location -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128

$dataDisk1 = New-AzureRmDisk -DiskName $dataDiskName -Disk $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName $rgName

$vm = Get-AzureRmVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName

$vm = Add-AzureRmVMDataDisk $vm -Name $dataDiskName -CreateOption Attach -ManagedDiskId $dataDisk1.Id -Lun 1

Update-AzureRmVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName

Next you need to initialize the managed disk either using the disk management tools of the OS or using PowerShell like this Windows OS example:

$disks = Get-Disk |   Where partitionstyle -eq ‘raw’ | sort number

$letters = 70..89 | ForEach-Object { ([char]$_) }
$count = 0
$labels = @(“data1″,”data2”)

foreach($d in $disks) {
    $driveLetter = $letters[$count].ToString()
    $d |
    Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle MBR -PassThru |
    New-Partition -UseMaximumSize -DriveLetter $driveLetter |
    Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel $labels[$count] `
        -Confirm:$false -Force
    $count++
}

To attach a managed disk to a Linux VM using Azure CLI see this example:

az vm disk attach –g myResourceGroup –-vm-name myVM –-disk myDataDisk –-new

 For more on creating managed disks with VMs see here and here.

 

How do I use the new Snapshot feature with managed disks?

 

Snapshots are a new feature that can be used with Managed disks to snap a point in time backup of a single managed disk. See below for examples: 

Click on Add and search for Snapshot:

 

Select the managed disk you want take a snapshot of:

 

Now you have a snapshot of the managed disk created:

From here you can use this snapshoted OS managed disk to create dev/test VM or use it for a point in time/state backup.  Note: Snapshots only snap a single managed disk not a whole VM and all the attached managed disks.

To snap a Linux VM using Azure CLI:

# take the disk id with which to create a snapshot
osDiskId=$(az vm show -g myResourceGroup -n myVM –query “storageProfile.osDisk.managedDisk.id” -o tsv)
az snapshot create -g myResourceGroup –source-disk “$osDiskId” –name osDisk-backup

How do I convert my current VM disks (unmanaged disks) to managed disks?

The good news is you can convert your unmanaged Standard (HDD) and Premium (SSD) OS and attached data disks to managed disks using a deallocation of the VM and a conversion using Azure PowerShell.   

You can convert from HDD unmanaged to HDD managed or SSD unmanaged to SSD managed or from HDD unmanaged to SSD managed.  Here are some examples:

note: you need to install Azure PowerShell 3.5 or higher to run these new cmdlets.

 

For example if you wanted to convert unmanaged Standard (HDD) disk to Premium (SSD) managed disk you would run the following: 

1. Before you attempt to convert from unmanaged to managed disks backup all the VMs/disks.

 2. You must use Azure CLI or Azure PowerShell to covert the disks.

In the example below I converted unmanaged Standard (HDD) to managed Premium (SSD) disk using Azure PowerShell:

Set the variables:

$resourceGroupName = ‘DataScienceRG’
$vmName = ‘Datasciencevm1’
$size = ‘Standard_DS2_v2’

$vm = Get-AzureRmVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName

Stop the VM for conversion:

Stop-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -Name $vmName -Force

Convert from unmanaged to managed disks:

$vm.HardwareProfile.VmSize = $size
Update-AzureRmVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName

ConvertTo-AzureRmVMManagedDisk -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName –VMName

 

To convert all the disks in a VM:

$vmDisks = Get-AzureRmDisk -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName
foreach ($disk in $vmDisks)
    {
    if($disk.OwnerId -eq $vm.Id)
        {
         $diskUpdateConfig = New-AzureRmDiskUpdateConfig –AccountType PremiumLRS
         Update-AzureRmDisk -DiskUpdate $diskUpdateConfig -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName `
         -DiskName $disk.Name
        }
    }

 

If it converted to managed disks successfully you will see “Provisioning state: succeeded”

To see more on converting from unmanaged disks to managed disks visit here for PowerShell and here CLI.