Managed Disks

by
Andrew Snodgrass

by
Andrew Snodgrass

Andrew analyzes and writes about Microsoft's data management, business intelligence, and machine learning solutions, as well as aspects of licensing... more

Azure Managed Disks is an offering in the Azure Storage collection of services. Managed disks are used exclusively as attached storage for Azure VMs. Unlike the other Azure Storage services, they aren’t accessed through the Azure Storage UI in the Azure portal, and the storage account where they reside is created automatically by the service and can’t be seen. Managed disks are created alongside the VM they support, and configuration of the disk (size, performance, redundancy, and encryption) is done directly on the managed disk.

Product: Managed Disks

Licensing: Managed Disks

Near-Term Roadmap (2026–2027)

Recent Managed Disks development makes Premium solid-state drive (SSD) v2 and Ultra Disks easier to adopt for production VMs. Live resizing allows customers to increase disk capacity without application downtime, while Azure Site Recovery support enables these high-performance workloads to use Microsoft’s managed disaster recovery service. Instant Access Snapshots, currently in preview, can restore Premium SSD v2 and Ultra Disks immediately rather than waiting for the snapshot data to be copied, reducing recovery times and accelerating the creation of test or development environments.