Azure VM Disk Features Enhanced

Storage enhancements to Azure virtual machines (VMs) should enable easier creation and higher performance and allow VM administrators to more readily create new VMs (and optionally scale sets) from an existing VM. These new storage features are only available for Azure VMs deployed using the Azure Resource Manager (ARM) model. Customers looking to use the new functionality with VMs based on Standard (non-SSD) storage will be faced with a price increase, but Microsoft will offset that increase through July 31, 2017.

Easier Deployment and Management of Virtual Disks

Traditionally, deployment of an Azure VM required the administrator to specify a storage account where the VM’s virtual hard disks (VHDs) used for the OS and data would be stored. This created several problems during the life cycle of an Azure VM:

Performance constraints. A storage account is limited to 20,000 I/O operations per second (IOPS), which can result in performance issues for the group of disks stored within that account. Administrators must reconcile the demands of their individual servers and disks against this limit to ensure that VHDs are adequately spread across multiple storage accounts, rather than face a performance upper bound with a single account.