Operating system disk: In Azure, every virtual machine will have an operating system disk.
Temporary disk: Each VM contains a temporary drive. The temporary disk provides short-term storage for applications and processes.
Data disk: A data disk is a VHD that’s attached to a virtual machine to store application data or other data we need to keep.

Performance tiers

Standard Storage: It is backed by HDDs and deliver cost-effective storage while still being performant. It is ideal for development and testing, not-critical, and Infrequent access because the max throughput and IOPS per disk is 60MB/s and 500, respectively.
Premium Storage: It is backed by SSDs, and deliver high-performance, low-latency disk support for VMs running I/O-intensive workloads. The maximum throughput and IOPS per disk are 250MB/s and 7500, respectively.

Types of the disk in Azure

Unmanaged disks: It is the traditional type of disks that have been used by VMs. We can create our storage account and specify the storage account when you create the disk. The scalability targets of SA (20, 000 IOPS) are not exceeded.
Managed disks: Managed disks handles the storage account creation/management. We do not have to care about scalability limits the storage account. Microsoft always recommends us to use Azure Managed Disks for new VMs.

Disk encryption

Storage Service Encryption: Azure Storage Service Encryption provides encryption-at-rest and safeguards our data to meet our organizational security and compliance commitments. It is enabled by default for all Managed Disks, Snapshots, and Images in every region where managed disks are available.
Azure Disk Encryption: Azure Disk Encryption allows you to encrypt the OS and Data disks used by an IaaS Virtual Machine. For Windows, the drives are encrypted using industry-standard BitLocker encryption technology. For Linux, the disks are encrypted using the DM-Crypt technology.

Virtual Machine Availability

Availability Set: Availability Set is a logical grouping of VMs within a data center that allows Azure services to understand how our application is built to provide redundancy and availability. An availability set is composed of two additional groupings that protect against hardware failures and allow updates to be applied safely.
- Fault domains- It is a logical group of the underlying hardware that shares a common network switch and power source, similar to a rack within an on-premises datacenter.
- Update Domain: It is a logical group of the underlying hardware that will go under maintenance or be rebooted at the same time.
- Managed Disk fault domains: For VMs using Azure Managed Disks, VMs are aligned with managed disk fault domains when using a managed availability set. This alignment ensures that all the managed disks attached to a VM are within the same managed disk fault domain.
Availability Zones: It is a physically separate zone within an Azure region. There are three Availability zones per supported within the Azure region. All availability zone has the same amount of power source, network, and cooling, and is separated from the other Availability Zones within the Azure region.

Storage Availability

Azure Managed Disks
- Locally redundant storage (LRS): We will have three copies of the same data within the same facility. So, if there is a datacenter failure, then there is a high probability that we might lose the data.
Storage account-based disks
- Locally redundant storage (LRS): It maintains three replicas with the facility.
- Zone redundant storage (ZRS): It maintains three replicas but across facilities.
- Geo-redundant storage (GRS): The replicas will be maintained in a paired region. For example – if our disk is in Central US, a copy will be kept in East US also.
- Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS): The copy will be available for read-only access in a different region.

Creating Availability Set

We will see here how Azure evenly distributes your virtual machines into different fault and update domains of that availability set.

Step 1: Click on New, then type in an Availability set, and press enter. Now, Click on Create.

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Step 2: You are currently on the Availability set creation page. Fill in all the required details as shown in the figure below, and click on Create.

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Step 3: Now Click on Go to resource to open the Availability set.

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Step 4: Click on Virtual Machine. Any virtual machine that you have added to this Availability set will show here.

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This is how you can make a web server farm tolerant of both unplanned outages and planned outages.

So, this brings us to the end of blog. This Tecklearn ‘Azure VM Storage’ blog helps you with commonly asked questions if you are looking out for a job in Azure and Cloud Computing. If you wish to learn Microsoft Azure and build a career in Cloud Computing domain, then check out our interactive, Microsoft Azure Developer and Administrator Training, that comes with 24*7 support to guide you throughout your learning period. Please find the link for course details:

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This Course provides training for Microsoft Azure Administrator and Azure Developer. Tecklearn’s Azure Administrator training provides you with a deep understanding of the entire administrative lifecycle in Azure environments. This Azure course shows you how to maintain services related to computing, storage, network, and security. Enhance your Azure Administrator skills and prepare to ace the AZ-103 Azure Administrator exam. The Azure Developer certification course prepares you for Microsoft’s Azure Developer certification exam AZ-203. It covers Azure architecture, Azure technology development solutions, Azure storage services, and solutions, Cognitive Services such as Computer Vision, Q&A Maker, Azure service solutions, and API management services.

Why Should you take Azure Developer and Administrator Training?

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By 2022, 90% of enterprises will use both the IaaS and PaaS capabilities from cloud provider – Gartner

What you will Learn in this Course?

Introduction to Azure Compute Solutions and Cloud Computing

Introduction to Microsoft Azure
About Azure Certification

Overview of Azure Storage Services

Azure Storage
Azure File Use Case
Azure DNS
Azure Site Recovery

Secure and Manage Azure Storage

Security Issue
Azure Regions
Azure Services

Implementing Secure Data Solutions and Integrating Caching & CDN

Azure CDN
Azure Traffic Manager
Azure Load Balancer
Azure Scale Set

Implementing Azure App Service Web Apps and Mobile Apps

Design and Implement Azure Service Apps
Web Apps
Pricing Calculator – Azure

Managing Azure Subscriptions and Resource Groups

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Create App Service Plan
Create Web App and Deploy Angular Application using SCM
Deploy .NET Application using SCM
Deploy App using Visual Studio
Web Job Types
Sendgrid

Develop Event-based and Message-based Solutions in Azure

Messaging Strategy
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Microsoft Azure Service Bus
Queues
Topics
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Create Subscription
Azure Relay
Using EventHubs

Implementing Azure App Service API Apps & Azure Functions

Azure PAAS Services
API Management
Function Apps
Logic Apps

Overview of Azure Virtual Machines and Configure Virtual Machines for High Availability

Virtual Machines
Create VM
PowerShell DSC and Custom Script Extension
Scale ARM VMS
VMSS
Monitoring VMs
Dev Test Labs
VM Storage

Design and implement Azure DevOps

CI/CD Pipelines
VSTS
Deployment in pass and VM’s
Scheduled deployments

Manage Azure Active Directory (AD)

Manage Identity, Application and Network Services
Overview of Azure Active Directory
Azure Active Directory B2C
Azure Active Directory B2B
Key Vault
Azure Graph API

Azure Virtual Networks and Network Security

Redis Caching
Azure search
Virtual Networks
Configure Virtual Network
Hybrid Network Connectivity
ARM VM Networking
Azure security and recovery services

Developing Solutions That Use Relational Database and Azure Blob Storage

Azure DB Services – SQL DB
Azure Notifications
Backup and Restore
Enabling Geo-Replication
Export source Database
Scale Azure SQL Databases

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Azure Key Vault
Azure App Insights

Azure Command Line Interface (CLI) and PowerShell

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ARM templates
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PowerShell runbooks
Azure Automation
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