I'm interested in creating a VM in Azure and downloading to my own machine to use in Hyper-V. The past couple of attempts at creating a VM have resulted in a 127Gb image. Can anyone tell me what the absolute smallest windows vm available is and how I can choose this in set up. There doesn't seem to be any options for anything smaller than this.
You can use windows vms labeled as smalldisk, those will have 30gb os disk size. any linux vm will have 30gb os disk by default.
if using non portal, you can specify os disk size, I didnt ever try to downsize it below 30, but cant imagine why it wont work (unless there isn't enough space on the disk).
Azure recently announced new B-series VM size, B1ls, which has the smallest memory and lowest cost among Azure VM instances. This offering is in response to customers who were looking for entry-level offerings. B1ls has 512 MiB of memory and 1 vCPU, and it costs only $0.0052 (US East) per hour.
B1ls is available only on Linux.
Reference: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/b-series-update-b1ls-is-now-available/
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So I am running a small VM for personal stuff on azure and want to minimize cost. The disk cost is significant part of my per day spending. I am running standard Ubuntu 18.04 image and already selected standard HDD instead of SSD for disk. but the current OS disk is of size 30GB and I am hardly using 3GB of it. I want to use smaller disk but I can't find a option to do so.
For your issue, I'm afraid it's impossible. The reason is that when you gonna create a VM from the VM image, the OS disk size must be bigger than the image size. I think you know the limitation. And in Azure, it also makes sense. For example, you can see the details of the VM image Ubuntu 18.04-LTS:
You see the VM image size is 31, so the VM OS disk size should bigger than 31. When you want to create the VM, you can see the details about the VM image first, and then you will know if what is the minimum size of the OS disk.
Good Morning, Fellow Stack Overflow-ers,
I have a Windows 2019 DC Virtual Machine with a 127GiB OS Disk with MS Azure. The WM image is Standard B2s (2 vcpus, 4 GiB memory)
I want to swap this with a smaller 8GiB OS disk - having successfully created this in my portal and labelled useastOS - Azure is failing to allow me to swap from the previous 127GiB disk to the smaller 8GiB Disk. On the "Swap OS Disk" menu illustrated, you will see there is no option to use the useastOS disk.
Puzzling.
This is a managed disk and so there is no reason whatsoever as to why Azure is not giving me the option.
So my question is there any valid reason as to why Azure is not allowing me to swap to the smaller useastOS or is this bug within Azure that I need to make Azure aware of?
When you are creating a Managed Disk like this, there is no SO installed, it is an empty disk, that's why Azure assumes it is a data disk, not a SO disk.
Now, when you upload your VHD disk to blob storage, you can tell Azure that this disk is OS and not a data disk like this.
Looking for upload VHD to Azure blob, here it is an example https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/prepare-for-upload-vhd-image.
Your question is how to swap SO disk to a new one smaller, this is what I understood, in case you just want to add a second disk as a data disk, you can go to VM overview, from blade disk, you can add it easily.
Anyway, I hope that I could help in any :)
Just in case, confirm that you selected an operation system when you created this disk useastOS. For example, in my case it is Windows, but disk can be either Windows or Linux, when you don't select anything, Azure assumes it is a data disk, not an operation system.
Azure says here that
750 Hours of B1S VM and 64 GB X 2 Managed Disks, 2 P6 SDDs
and some others are free each month for 12 months.
On VM create in Azure Portal, There are Basics, Disks and other tabs, In Basics, I could able to select Image Size to B1S VM but in Disks tab, there is no option to select Managed Disk of 64GB of P6 SDDs.
There are only three options i.e Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Standard HDD. Whatever I select and proceed further, VM takes default of 128 GB C Drive and 4 GB of Temp Drive and starts billing.
Where can I select that free 64 GB X 2 Managed Disks, 2 P6 SDDs.?
Just hover mouse over "create" in the virtual machines tab in menu. That will show a "free VM" option. Click that and it configures everything required for a free VM.
In Azure Portal use the search square box (on top) and look for "Free Services" then you will be able to use free VM and other services.
I don't think you can change disk os disk size at all (only increase it), but there are Windows images called smalldisk; those have 30gb disk. You can use those, they should work just fine.
After making the VM, open the resource group of the vm. Click the disk of the vm (Be sure that the VM is to be switched off, else it won't work) and select the disk. Open the disk and on the sidebar click size and performance and resize the disk to p6.
I think VM creation is not completely free. You have to pay for computing power and disk. Please response if I am wrong.
I need to know the difference between the SSD disk and the data disk. According to this capture, this virtual machine has a hard disk ssd 16gb, and 4 disks data. But these 4 disks, how much do they have? Are they ssd? what are they for?
enter image description here
data disks can be ssd or not, depending on how you set them up. they are used to store data :)
amount of data disks you can attach depends on the vm sku. you dont always have to attach 4 data disks (or whatever vm supports, you can have 0 - VM SKU maximum data disks).
The 16gb ssd is local ssd (local to the host machine hosting your vm) attached to the VM (not OS disk). its a temporary drive - meaning it can go away when you reboot vm, so content will be lost and you will get a new temporary drive. it can be used to store throw away logs, for example, or temporary files. IO operations on this disk do not count towards IO limit and this drive is completely free (you pay for the VM SKU and it is part of that cost).
you can learn about data disk prices here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/. Storage prices do not take into account os or data disks. they just bill you for storage.
reference:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/attach-managed-disk-portal
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/attach-disk-ps
It means in addition to the OS disk, you can connect 4 data disks to the VM.
It does not mean there are 4 disks, just that you can add 4 if you want.
You should discuss the VM requirements with your client. Maybe he needs an additional data disk, maybe not.
The capture you posted, specifies that this VM can take up to 4 data disks. The price does not include them. Also, you should check the Azure price calculator to generate more accurate offers.
Maybe I don't fully understand how Azure charges for VHD storage.
When I started out, I had a 120gb VHD with only ~30gb used. I was only getting charged for roughly 1gb per day for Azure. As I filled up the hard drive, the daily usage grew as expected. I ended up using 100gb of the drive and was getting hit with roughly 3.6gb per day from Azure. That makes perfect sense to me.
The other day, I free'd up a lot of space on the VHD and now I only use 30gb again where the other 90gb is free space. However, it seems that I'm still getting charged for roughly 3.6gb per day.
Could someone help explain this to me? Do I need to do something to reclaim the free space? If so, how?
Thanks
It's now possible to manually reclaim unused space by executing the following PowerShell command (starting from Windows Server 2012 / R2):
Optimize-Volume -DriveLetter F -ReTrim
More information: Release unused space from your Windows Azure Virtual Hard Disks to reduce their billable size
Even though the files on the VHD may be deleted, you still pay for the space they once consumed. Check out this post by the Windows Azure storage team - http://blogs.msdn.com/b/windowsazurestorage/archive/2012/06/28/exploring-windows-azure-drives-disks-and-images.aspx.
In the "Storage Capacity" section -
"It is also important to note that when you delete files within the file system used by the VHD, most operating systems do not clear or zero these ranges, so you can still be paying capacity charges within a blob for the data that you deleted via a disk/drive."