Azure Managed Disks

Azure Managed Disks are block-level storage volumes managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. They abstract away the complexity of managing storage accounts for VM disks, providing high availability, durability, and scalable performance. This lesson covers disk types, sizing, performance tiers, encryption, and best practices.

---

What Are Managed Disks?

Managed Disks are Azure's recommended disk storage solution for VMs. Unlike unmanaged disks (which require you to create and manage storage accounts and page blobs yourself), managed disks handle all the underlying storage account management automatically.

Key Benefits

• Simplified management — no storage account management for disks
• High availability — 99.999% availability; data replicated three times
• Scalable — up to 64 TB per disk; up to 32,767 GiB for Ultra Disks
• Integration — works with Availability Sets, Availability Zones, and Azure Backup
• Encryption — server-side encryption enabled by default
• Snapshots and images — create point-in-time copies and custom VM images

---

Disk Roles

Every VM can have three types of disk attached: