Azure Classroom Series – 27/Aug/2020

How to create Disks in Azure

• Azure provides two major ways of creating Disks
  • Azure Storage Account: This helps in creating un-managed disks (Which is not recommended)
  • Azure Managed Disks
• Lets look at Azure Storage Account options later

Terms

• IOPS: IOPS measures number of read and write operations per second on the disk
• Throughput: measures number of bits read or write per second.
• For SSD disks 1 IOPS = 256 Kib/S

Azure Managed disks

• Azure Managed disks are block-level storage volumes managed by azure & they are used with Azure VMs.

• Types of disks:

  • Ultra disks
  • premium SSD
  • Standard SSD
  • Standard HDD

• Ultra disks:

  • Azure ultra disks deliver high throughput, high IOPS & low latency disk storage for Azure VMs.
  • Ultra disks are used in data intensive workloads top tier databases, transaction-heavy workloads.
  • Ultra disks can be used only as data disks not as Os disks.
  • Max disk size: 65536 GiB
  • Max throughput: 2000 MB/s
  • Max IOPS: 160000
  • Disk Sizes: Ultra disks come with fixed sizes, ranging from 4 GiB to 64 TiB.

• Premium SSD:

  • This can be used as OS disk & Data Disk.
  • Deliver high performance, low latency support for VMS
  • I/O -intensive workloads is where this disk type is preferred.
  • Max Disk Size: 32767 GiB
  • Max throughput: 900 MB/s
  • Max IOPS: 20000
  • Premium ssd can be used only with few vm sizes. Any vm size which ends with s like B1s, B2s etc
  • Refer Here for official docs

• Standard SSD:

  • Cost effective SSD solution optimized for consistent performance for Azure VMs
  • Max Disk Size: 32767 GiB
  • Max throughput: 750 MB/s
  • Max IOPS: 6000
  • This is used for WebServers, Dev/Test Environments
  • Refer here for official docs

• Standard HDD:

  • Low cost disk:
  • Used for Backup, non-critical workloads with infrequent access
  • Max Disk Size: 32767 GiB
  • Max throughput: 500 MB/s
  • Max IOPS: 2000
  • Refer Here for official docs

• Billing:

  • The following factors impact billing of the disk
    • Disk Type
    • Disk Size
    • Snapshots (Backup of a disk)
    • Outbound data transfers
    • Number of Transactions
  • For billing Refer Here
  • Azure Reservations: Disk Reservation is an option to purchase one year of disk storage in advance at a discount.
  • Disk prices may vary from Region to Region

• Benefits of Azure Managed disks

  • Highly durable & Available: Managed disks are designed for 99.9999% availability, They achieve this by providing with 3 replicas of data.
  • To protect against regional disasters, We can use Azure Backup to create a backup job with time based backups.

Next Steps

• How are Disks allocated to Azure Vm
• Shared Disks
• Ephemeral OS Disks
• Backup & Recovery for disks