Showing posts with label Managed Disks. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Managed Disks. Show all posts
Lets talk about managed disks
Managed disks are Azure managed virtual machine disks that are easily added during virtual machine (VM) builds. When activating the managed disk its added to your VM in replacement of the traditional storage account based unmanaged disk. Originally this was the only way of doing this as all VM disks had to be placed into storage accounts. Adding a managed disk though VM creation is a very easy process and literally takes one click:
There are many advantages for using manged disks opposed to traditional unmanaged disk storage which are mainly related to less overhead management, less resource sprawl, secured disk storage, better high availability and reliability on virtual machine disk storage.
Simplified Management - You can specify the type of disk and size needed and Azure will automatically create and manage the disks for you.
Scalable virtual machine deployments - Create thousands of managed disks within minutes. Create up to 1000 virtual machines in scale sets in a single large cluster.
More Secure - Using Azure RBAC (Role Based Access Control) you are able to create granular role based access control on your managed disks.
Highly durable and available - Your data is replicated simultaneously to three different replicas. If one replica fails there are two others to take over.
The below is a great comparison between unmanaged and managed disks:
There are also various further advantages of using managed disks. Namely multiple storage options like SSD premium managed disks for critical performance intensive workloads, and HDD for standard managed disk non-critical workloads. Easy migration from standard to premium managed disks as well as your existing ARM (Azure Resource Manager) virtual machines into managed disks. Point in time backup snapshot of your managed disk to create new managed disks later. Simple custom image management and encryption with bringing your own keys is available.
Managed disks are now the best way to use virtual machine disks in Azure. It's actually much easier to roll out and less admin than unmanaged disks as well as more reliable.
Managed disks are now the best way to use virtual machine disks in Azure. It's actually much easier to roll out and less admin than unmanaged disks as well as more reliable.
Please read the following for additional information:
Using Azure Site Recovery with Managed Disks
Today I will be elaborating on that article slightly to explain a new feature that was announced last week around being able to protect Azure VM's using managed disks.
What are managed disks?
Managed disks are basically VM level disks that are managed and controlled by Azure. What this means is that when you are creating a new VM you are given an option of using an existing storage account and creating a normal disk in this location or the option of selecting a managed disk. A managed disk simplifies overall storage management and is also more reliable as its managed by Azure and will have better high availability during planned or unplanned maintenance. This can really help with making your life easier!
What is Azure Site Recovery?
As mentioned in the previous article Azure Site Recovery is used to be able to provide a business continuity disaster recovery (BC/DR) service for your IaaS VM's in Azure or on premises. ASR can also be used to migrate your on premises VM's into Azure. For further information on configuring this to protect an indivudual VM's please view the full article here: http://www.ruckcloud.ml/2018/02/using-azure-site-recovery-to-replicate.html
The new feature announced is implemented within the disaster recovery (preview) section and relates to your selections for setting up protection. You now have the option to select managed disks for replication. What this means is that you can select the manage disks that you would like to migrate to the secondary region, thus creating a fail-over copy. This also means that you will not need to select a storage account to migrate unless you still have VM's that may be located in them. Below is an image from Microsoft depicting this:
As you can see from this image, you now have the following options:
Source Managed Disk - Your original primary location VM managed disk
Replica Managed Disk - Your new replica managed disk location for protection
Replica Managed Disk Type - The type of managed disk that was initially selected
So in order to sum up this service, the advantage that this gives us is that any VM's with managed disks can easily be replicated to a secondary region through the Azure Site Recovery (preview) service without the need of managing multiple storage accounts within the target location in order to manage all of your replicated virtual machines.
Please read the official Microsoft blog post on the subject for further detailed information:
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