Deploying Managed Disks with New Azure VMs

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This post will show you how to deploy a new Azure virtual machine using Managed Disks using the Azure Portal.

New Virtual Machine

Log into the Azure Portal, and click New. Expand Compute and select an operating system such as Windows Server 2016 Datacenter. A blade will appear that describes the image that you have selected; click Create if this is the image that you want to deploy from.
 

 
A Create Virtual Machine blade will appear, and a Basics child-blade will automatically open; you will provide some basic information in this blade:

  • Name: The name of the virtual machine, which will also be the computer name of the guest OS.
  • VM Disk Type: Your options are HDD and SSD; this impacts the next blade where the series/specs of virtual machines are filtered based on your storage requirements.
  • User Name: The name of the default administrator account, which cannot be one of the well-known names such as Administrator.
  • Password: This must be between 12 and 123 characters long, and have 3 of the following – 1 lower case character, 1 upper case character, 1 digit, and 1 special character.
  • Subscription: The subscription that you want to deploy the virtual machine into.
  • Resource Group: Either create a new resource group for the new machine or place it into an existing one.
  • Location: The Azure region that you will deploy the new machine into.

Click OK when you have entered all of the required information.

Creating a new virtual machine – Basics [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
Creating a new virtual machine – Basics [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
Tip: You can easily convert from standard (HDD) Managed Disks to premium (SSD) Managed Disks. But this requires that you are running an “S” virtual machine, one of the series’ that supports premium storage. Some people choose to deploy “S” series machines instead of the normal ones just in case they might need to do this conversion. You should click “SSD” as the VM Disk Type to make these machines available to you in the next step — remember you don’t have to use SSD disks with “S” series machines.
The next blade that opens is Size; here you will choose a series and size of virtual machine. Some default options are listed, but you can click View All to view all of the available options. Choose a machine size and click Select.

The Settings Blade allows you to configure the storage, networking, management, and fault tolerance of the virtual machine. This is where the deployment process changed with the addition of Managed Disks. At the top of the blade, we are asked is we want to use Managed Disks. There are two options:

  • No: The default option steers you towards the classic option of deploying disks into a storage account.
  • Yes: You will deploy a virtual machine that uses Managed Disks instead of un-managed disks in a storage account.

 

Creating a new Azure virtual machine – choosing Managed Disks [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
Creating a new Azure virtual machine – choosing Managed Disks [Image Credit: Aidan Finn]
Complete the dialog box with your desired configuration and then click OK. Complete the wizard and your virtual machine will be deployed.