Azure Managed Disks – Microsoft AZ-900 Exam

7.5. Azure Managed Disks

Azure Managed Disks is Microsoft Azure’s highly durable and available block storage solution for Azure Virtual Machines (VMs). Managed Disks simplifies disk management for Azure IaaS VMs by managing the storage accounts associated with the VM disks on your behalf. It takes away the complex storage management, allowing you to provision the VM disks without worrying about the complexity of storage.

Understanding Azure Managed Disks

Azure Managed Disks abstract the storage aspect from the user. You specify the size of the disk and the performance tier, and Azure creates and manages the disk for you. These disks are stored as page blobs, which are a random IO storage object in Azure.

Key Features of Azure Managed Disks

Simplified Management: Managed Disks offer a simplified management experience by removing the need to create or manage storage accounts. This is particularly advantageous as the number of disks scales.

High Durability and Availability: Disks are designed to be highly durable and available. Azure guarantees that Managed Disks are designed for 99.999% availability.

Integrated Backup and Restore: Managed Disks can be easily backed up to different recovery vaults and restored if necessary, providing straightforward business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities.

Snapshots: You can take a point-in-time snapshot of a Managed Disk, which is a full, read-only copy of the disk.

Access Control: With Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), you can segregate duties within your team and grant only the amount of access to users that they need to perform their jobs.

Encryption: Managed Disks support Azure Disk Encryption. Disks can be encrypted at-rest using keys managed by Azure Key Vault, helping to safeguard and control cryptographic keys and secrets.

Scalability: Azure Managed Disks can support up to 50,000 IOPS and 2,000 MiB/sec of throughput, making them suitable for a wide range of workloads.

Performance Tiers: Managed Disks offer different performance tiers, from Standard HDD to Premium SSD and the latest Ultra Disks, which offer sub-millisecond latencies.

Types of Managed Disks

Managed Disks offer several types of persistent storage options:

● Standard HDD: These are backed by magnetic drives and are best suited for dev/test and other infrequent access workloads.
● Standard SSD: These are a cost-effective storage option optimized for workloads that need consistent performance at lower IOPS levels.
● Premium SSD: These are backed by solid-state drives (SSDs) and offer high-performance, low-latency disk support for VMs running I/O-intensive workloads.
● Ultra Disks: These are the newest offering that provide high throughput, high IOPS, and very low latency, which can be dynamically changed along with the VM size.

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