Microsoft announced an insight with the general availability of Managed Disks. With this particular PaaS-like support, you will no longer require to be concerned with the complexity of storage management and neither do you need to worry about storage as you scale. However, you will still have the complete control and power which you expect and enjoyed with
Azure VMs – a PaaS bridge" on Microsoft’s IaaS VMs.
This will not only simplify the management of every VM created but is exponentially helpful also while deploying a cloud-scale with VM Scale Sets. The Azure VM scale sets (VMSS) are quite powerful so as to reliably deploy massive cloud infrastructure without the overhead of co-coordinating multiple resources. With the Scale sets, you will be able to simplify the management of your applications with automated application scale and load –balancer integration.
The current announcement goes on to extend these particular platform features so as to include automated disk management, which would go on to enable simpler storage management and also larger scale. With the help of the Managed Disks, you will now be able to attach data disks to every instance and also create a VM scale set up to 1.000 VMs, an increase of 10X.
Corey Sanders Director of Compute, Azure, states,
“These capabilities are just the beginning to bring the agility of PaaS to the comfort of IaaS. I look forward to announcing additional capabilities coming later this year, including OS patching support, application lifecycle integration, application health monitoring, and load-balancer app health integration.”
Let us now discuss the main benefits of Managed Disks and VM Scale Sets.
Management
Managed Disks free you from the storage account scale management. Managed Disks are Azure Resource Manager (ARM) resources which can be completely templatized, and support both Standard and Premium Disk types. However, you will need to specify the size as well as the type of the disk which you want.
You will now be able to create numerous Managed Disks without worrying about the storage account and without the need to specify any details of the disk. You will also be able to create a blank disk, from VHD in a storage account, or create one from an image as part of VM creation. You can migrate an existing Azure Resource Manager VM to a VM managed disks with just a single reboot. You no longer need to worry about re-configuring your networking or your security rules, so as to start using the powerful new capabilities. For more information, check the official blog.
Snapshot and Backup
You will now be able to take a Disk Snapshot and maintain it as an Azure Resource Manager resource. With the help of the snapshots, you will be able to back up your managed Disks at any point of time. For more information, check the official blog.
Image
Managed Disks will also go on to support creating managed custom image. You will now be able to create an image from your custom VHD in a storage account or directly from a running VM. This captures in a single image, all Managed Disks associated with running Virtual Machine, which goes on to include both the OS and the Data Disks. This will also go on to enable deploying a large VM Scale Set with several VMs using your custom Image, without the need to copy to or manage any storage accounts.
Sean Hyrich, mLab, states,
“The new Managed Disks significantly reduces code complexity and simplifies the management of disks. Managed Disks will enable us to expand upon our current database-as-a-service offering on Azure with new MongoDB plan types to help meet the demanding workloads of our users.”
Creating a VM
Using the Azure PowerShell or AZ CLI, you will be able to easily create a VM with Managed Disks. You will also be able to easily create a VM with Managed Disks in the portal by selecting, “Use managed disks:”