Azure Managed Disks

Key features

Some key features and benefits of using managed disks in your Azure environment include the following:

• High availability, resiliency, and redundancy Microsoft provides 99.999% availability for VM workloads that use managed disks. Managed disks are designed to maintain multiple replicas—three to be exact, spread across an Azure region. This makes managed disks extremely resilient, and ensures that your workload can continue to process even if there are issues with one or two replicas. Microsoft provides an industry leading 0% annualized failure rate.

• High scalability Microsoft currently supports the deployment of 50,000 managed disks per region per subscription, allowing large enterprises to deploy thousands of VMs in a single subscription.

• Support for large Virtual Machine Scale Sets (VMSS) You can use managed disks with VMSS. The scalability of managed disks makes it possible to deploy large VMSS consisting of up to 1,000 nodes.

• Support for availability sets Azure Managed Disks provides native integration with availability sets. Disks for VMs that are part of an availability set are spread across multiple fault domains with the selected Azure region and isolated from each other.

• Support for availability zones You can deploy managed disks across availability zones to improve redundancy. Availability zones provide additional redundancy over availability sets because the power and networking in each availability zone is independent of the others.

• Support for existing virtual hard disks (VHDs) You can easily upload existing VHDs up to 32 terabytes (TB) in size to Azure for use as managed disks. This process makes it extremely easy for organizations to migrate their existing workloads to Azure.

• Role-based access control (RBAC) Azure Managed Disks supports permission management using Azure RBAC, making it possible to granularly assign permissions to managed disks to administrators based on their roles and responsibilities.

• Native integration with Azure Backup You can use Azure Backup to back up managed disks from within the Azure Managed Disks service. You can schedule backups during off-peak hours and retain backups based on your organizational policies. You restore backups from the Azure Backup service.

• Disk encryption Managed disks are encrypted by default. They support multiple types of encryption, including Microsoft-managed encryption keys, customer-managed encryption keys, and double encryption with both types of keys. In addition, managed disks support Azure Disk Encryption, which allows you to encrypt the disk inside the VM using BitLocker for Windows or DM-Crypt for Linux VMs.

• Easy migration for unmanaged disks You can easily migrate unmanaged disks stored in Azure Storage accounts to managed disks. This increases the resiliency and redundancy of your IaaS VMs and provides significantly higher availability for your workloads.

• Support for shared disks for clustered applications You can set up managed disks as shared disks. This allows you to attach them to multiple VMs to host or migrate clustered applications to Azure.

• Disk bursting for better performance Managed disks allow you to increase the IOPS available for use for Premium and Standard SSD disks with on-demand or credit-based bursting models. Each model provides different capabilities to maximize the performance of your workloads when needed.

• Private Link Support You can use Private Link to import or export managed disks to or from Azure. This enables organizations to securely transfer disk data over a completely private connection.