Tag: Resource Manager

How to: Implementing Storage Spaces insides Azure Virtual Machines

Within an Azure Virtual Machine, you should never store your (personal) data on the C: drive or the temporary disk. You can attach new storage disks to the virtual machine, how many disks depends on the VM size you’ve choosen.

View all VM sizes in Microsoft Azure:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/virtual-machines-windows-sizes

In my example I’ve choosen the ‘DS1v2’ VM size, so I can attach two extra (premium storage) disks. Because the maximum size of an disk in Microsoft Azure is 1023 GB, I’ve created multiple disks. Both disks are attached to the virtual machine and we’re going to implement Storage Spaces within the virtual machine. Storage Spaces is software defined storage (SDS) from Windows Server 2012 R2 and above.

Storage Spaces is a built-in Windows Server Role. When combining all the data disks, you can create one, or more, big data volumes in your Windows Virtual Machine. Extremely powerful for example file servers.

1.) First of all I’ve created a new virtual machine using the Azure Portal

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2.) Next I’ve created two new disks (premium storage – SSD) with tthe size of 1023 GB.

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3.) Next I’ve logged in into the new created virtual machine and configured Storage Spaces.

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4.) The next step is to create a new virtual disk

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5.) The final step is to create the new volume for storing your data on.

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As you can see, there’s a new volume of 2 TBwithin the virtual machine. If you’re changing the size of the virtual machine, it is also possible to add some more disks to the virtual machine and extend the Storage Spaces with more terabytes!!

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How to: Resize hard disk in Azure Resource Manager (ARM)

Resizing a virtual hard disk in Azure Resource Manager is really easy to do through the Azure Managent Portal. In a few clicks you can extend the virtual hard disk size. Note that the VM should be turned off!! So you need to plan a maintenance window!!
You can also extend the virtual hard disk with PowerShell. In this example I’ve extended the data disk from 25 to 30 GB.


# Specify the VM
$VM = Get-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName MSS-DEMO -VMName MSS-DEMO-DC01
# Set the new size of the data disk
Set-AzureRmVMDataDisk -VM $VM -Name MSS-DEMO-DC01-20160801-100246 -DiskSizeInGB 30
# View the new size of the data disk(s)
$VM.StorageProfile.DataDisks
# Update the configuration in Azure
Update-AzureRmVM -VM $VM -ResourceGroupName MSS-DEMO

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1.) Login to the Azure Management Portal
2.) Check the current size of the data disk. In my example 25 GB
3.) Start PowerShell and login to your Azure subscription
4.) Change the data disk to the new value
5.) Update the configuration to Azure
6.) Check the new size of the data disk with PowerShell or within the Azure Management Portal.
In my example the new size is 30 GB.