I have an Azure VM and I can see two drives c: and d:(says temp storage). Both drive allow me to create projects folders and use from Visual Studio. I would like to know which drive I get billed ie which one is the reliable drive which I should be using - Any one having idea?
Thanks
PL
In Azure VMs
C:\ drive comes along with the VM which 127 GB, no more no less. So this is the root volume and OS is also installed here, so might 127 GB - 40 GB so roughly 70 GB free space you can use.
C:\ - Cost : No Additional Cost, comes with compute charges
D:\ Is called the temporary drive, it is not persistent and when you stop and start the machine, this volume would be recycled. This drive operates at very high speed, this is good for temporary file storage etc. You can use this for logging as well, if you need to persist those logs, you can run a background job to push it Azure Blob or stuff etc.
D:\ - Cost : No Additional Cost, comes with compute charges
E:\ F:\ G:\ H:\ ... etc all can be used for all practical purposes. You will essentially attach a blob.
One suggestion what I can provide is you can attach a blank drive directly of 1TB ( for Azure 1023 GB). You will not be billed for the whole 1023 GB but only for volume of data being stored in the drive.
This drive would relatively slower than the C:\ & D:\, for the reasons of latency. It takes relatively longer to write over the wire and then to blob, than directly to the self attached disk. But that is the trade off which you need to choose for the size vs. speed.
E:\ F:\ G:\ H:\ ... - Cost : Additional Cost for storage,
transactions / operation
In a Windows Azure VM any data written to C: will be persisted across shutdowns, any data written to D: will be lost if the machine is shut down (from the management portal). So you should be using C:\ to store your data. Although it is recommended to have a separate disk drive to be attached for any in VM storage like application data etc.
If you need any additional drives on which data should be persisted across shutdowns/de-allocations you can add additional data disks to the Virtual Machine. There is a cap/limit on the number of data disks, which depends on the size of the virtual machine you have created.
You get billed for VM instance and not the temp storage.
Related
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.
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.
My Linux VMs each have two disk (OS + Data)
The data disks are currently set to 1024Gb but only contain <15Gb of content
In have two environments (test and production). The production data disk is premium the test data disk is standard.
I want to reduce the size of the production data disk because as I discovered Premium disks are changed on the full size, not just the amount being used as standard disks are.
So before doing this in production, I wanted to try in test. I stop the VM then try to change the size of the disk through the Azure portal but I get an error stating that the new size must be greater than the current - it won't let me reduce the size.
Is that a constraint of premium disks as tell? Is it a constraint of the Azure portal, or can I run CLI/powershell commands that can do this? Or am I forced to create a new disk, copy data, then remove the old disk?
You can't reduce the size of a disk, so you have to attach another disk and copy the content over using robocopy or other method.
Ideally, I'm looking for an article that explicitly says which disk(s) are ssd drives. At the moment I can see 3 disks. C, D and E. I used CristalDiskMark to test the speed of each disk and it turns out that D is by far the fastest so I'm assuming it is the SSD disk. The thing that does not make sense is that it is only 32GB on an a D12 VM and it should be 200GB.
Based on this post: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-in/blog/new-d-series-virtual-machine-sizes/, it is D:\. From this link:
On these new sizes, the temporary drive (D:\ on Windows, /mnt or
/mnt/resource on Linux) are local SSDs. This high-speed local disk is
best used for workloads that replicate across multiple instances, like
MongoDB, or can leverage this high I/O disk for a local and temporary
cache, like SQL Server 2014's Buffer Pool Extensions. Note, these
drives are not guaranteed to be persistent. Thus, while physical
hardware failure is rare, when it occurs, the data on this disk may be
lost, unlike your OS disk and any attached durable disks that are
persisted in Azure Storage.
I am playing with Windows Azure to create an small VM to host a service that almost doesn't take any space.
Windows Azure creates a default 130gb disk, with about 100gb free. That's way too much. I do not need that much space.
I understand that MSFT will charge the storage (ie: the 130gb), so I would like to create the VM smaller (probably 30 or 40gb).
Is it true that MSFT will charge me for the unused space?
Is there a way to create the machine the size I want?
If there is no way to create the machine in the size I want, how to resize? (the option to download the .vhd to my computer, resize locally and upload looks way too much effort to say the less).
Is it true that MSFT will charge me for the unused space?
Not true. This is because Virtual Machines are essentially Page Blobs and page blobs are charged based on the occupied bytes instead of total size. So even if a 130 GB disk is created for you and let's say you fill it with 30 GB of data, you'll only be charged for 30 GB instead of 130 GB. Please note that for block blobs you're charged for the size of the blob even if it's empty. You can read more about blobs here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee691964.aspx.
Is there a way to create the machine the size I want?
Currently no, but given that you're not charged for the unused space I don't see any reason why you would want to do that.
If there is no way to create the machine in the size I want, how to
resize?
Page blobs are resizable. Do take a look at this blog post on how to resize a page blob (and thus a VM image): http://blog.maartenballiauw.be/post/2013/01/07/Tales-from-the-trenches-resizing-a-Windows-Azure-virtual-disk-the-smooth-way.aspx