(Managed Disk vs Unmanaged Disk) in Azure VM

It’s been long Microsoft released managed disk for azure virtual machine . Now you can create virtual machine with or without managed disk . Before move into benefit of managed disk let’s understand what is managed disk .

Whenever we create a VM in azure it automatically create a .VHD file as a disk . Either this disk could be a part of Storage BLOB or it could be independent disk , where disk replication , availability managed by Microsoft .

Few features of managed disk :

• You are no longer limited by the storage account limits (such as 20,000 IOPS / account).
• You also no longer have to copy your custom images (VHD files) to multiple storage accounts.
• You can manage them in a central location – one storage account per Azure region – and use them to create hundreds of VMs in a subscription.
• Managed Disks will allow you to create up to 50,000 VM disks of a type in a subscription per region .
• Managed Disks are automatically placed in different storage scale units (stamps). If a stamp fails due to hardware or software failure, only the VM instances with disks on those stamps fail.
• Azure Disks are designed for 99.999% availability .
• You can use Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to assign specific permissions for a managed disk to one or more users.
• Managed Disks exposes a variety of operations, including read, write (create/update), delete, and retrieving a shared access signature (SAS) URI for the disk.
• Managed Disks only support Locally Redundant Storage (LRS) as the replication option. Three copies of the data are kept within a single region.