I'm using Azure VM (Ubuntu 16.04) as web server. For some reason at my resource group for VM there are two storages.
First - GRS Standart and second LRS Premium.
How to determine which storage is necessary for my web server and which I can safely delete?
You can check the storage account holding the disks (OS and Data disks) by clicking on Disks option and then clicking on individual disks. You will see the URL of the page blob holding the disk and that should tell you about the storage account.
However before deleting the other storage account, please check if it is not used for collecting diagnostics data for the VM.
Making an assumption, I believe your LRS Premium account is holding the disks and the other one is for storing diagnostics data.
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According to Microsoft documentation. there are managed disks and unmanaged disks. Managed disks are something managed by microsoft. All the VHDs are stored as page blob in storage account.
Question: When I create a linux VM with additional disk I don't see storage account created in resources list. I dont see storage account created when VMs are created for both OS disk and Data disk. I really appreciate if some one answer this.
Storage account and VM Disks are 2 separate things ?
There's a Storage Account and Page Blob behind the scenes but they are kind of hidden from you. When the disks are managed, the necessary infrastructure is created and managed by Microsoft so that you don't have to worry about them.
This is the reason you don't see any Storage Account and Page Blobs in your Azure Subscription for managed disks. You will see them only when your disks are unmanaged as then you are responsible for the management of these resources.
Please see this link for a nice comparison between managed and unmanaged disks: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3619/what-is-the-difference-between-managed-disk-and-un.html.
I am new to Azure and setting up the backup of multiple Azure VM's, all on the Location. 2 of the 3 VM's have additional data disks attached to them.
Will the Recovery Services Backup policy also back up the data on these disks or do I need to setup a separate backup policy to manage these? Thanks
Azure Backup for VMs include automatically all disks attached to the VM.
Note, there is some limitations to how quickly it can do the backup if there are multiple disks attached. See e.g. Plan your VM backup infrastructure in Azure for more infromation.
All attached data disks will be included in any VM which is enrolled into backups. Few limitations to take note of below.
There's also a private preview currently running for data disks which are 1TB+ in size, link below.
For Azure VM backup, each VM can have up to 16 data disks with each data disk being of size 1024GB or less.
Azure Backup (Private Preview) Support Disks up to 4TB
Azure Backup FAQ
I'm a lone dev that inherited a giant undocumented mess of an azure vm without any sysadmin-like training nor a lab to test things out. This vm runs our website just fine, but I couldn't log in to VestaCp because disk space usage is at 100%.
I did setup azure to make daily backups. Now I'm wondering if azure somehow stores them on the same machine e.g. they're the cause of the full disk space.
if so, how do I remove a set of old backups?
Now I'm wondering if azure somehow stores them on the same machine e.g. they're the cause of the full disk space.
As mentioned in the official document about creating a recovery services vault for a VM:
The location of Recovery Services vault determines the geographic region where your backup data is sent.
If you have virtual machines in multiple regions, create a Recovery Services vault in each region.
There is no need to specify the storage accounts used to store the backup data--the Recovery Services vault and the Azure Backup service automatically handle the storage.
Per my understanding, your VM backup data could be stored on the storage accounts that are managed automatically by the Recovery Services vault (ARM) and the Azure Backup service (ASM).
Moreover, if this issue could not be solved by removing a set of old backups, I assumed that you could follow this tutorial to resize Azure VM OS or Data Disk created using Azure Service Manager (ASM) or this tutorial for resizing ARM VM OS & Data disk.
I cannot find any information on the Azure site clarifying this - possibly it's my understanding of how these work - please can someone confirm I am correct.
If I have a VM (Windows generated from their template which I have then installed some software on) and shut it down (using the portal to deallocate it), I am no longer charged compute costs. I am still charged storage for the VHD file but there will be no storage transactions as the machine is switched off.
As and when I start it, a new instance is deployed, from the VHD I previously configured (this is important to start with the software installed still) and I will then be charged for storage transactions and compute minutes.
Also, for the storage on VHD files, is this goo-redundant or locally-redundant or do I choose when creating the VM?
If you create a storage account first, you have a choice of enabling geo-replication or not. Default value is enabled.
If you create a virtual machine, creation of a new storage account is an option. This account will default have geo-replication enabled.
You are correct on the charging.
We are using Azure Virtual machines to host our application in the cloud.
Couple of virtual machines are hosting web front-end(state-less) and one virtual machine is hosting SQL Server (data is stored in Data Disk).
As we all know, these virtual machines consist of OS Disk and Data Disk(optional) which uses VHD files stored in blob storage. We are using geo-redundant blob storage which stores these VHD files.
We are now planning for disaster recovery for our cloud application. So if a Microsoft data center is down, is it possible to spin up virtual machines in another data center with the help of OS Disk and Data Disk stored in geo-replicated storage?
You are not supposed to use geo-replicated storage with SQL Server data disks. This is documented at https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/dn133149.aspx. Specifically, the document states "When creating a storage account, disable geo-replication as consistent write order across multiple disks is not guaranteed. Instead, consider configuring a SQL Server disaster recovery technology between two Azure data centers".
Currently you can not control if/when Microsoft fails over to the secondary (geo-replicated) storage account. Microsoft controls that.
As I understand it, in the event that Microsoft does declare a disaster and fails over, then your VMs would still work. Perhaps you'd have to create the VM again from the VHD, but the data would be there (minus anything lost since the last sync to storage).