and each has a different number of associated IOPS, as shown in Table 12.2.
Table 12.2: Azure Premium Storage Disk Types
Premium Storage Disk TypeP10 P20 P30
Disk Size 128GB 512GB1024GB
IOPS per Disk 500 2,300 5,000Source: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/ storage-premium-storage/
Notice that the larger the disk purchased, the higher the number of IOPS. Therefore,
typically you will buy the disk based on the IOPS required. If you need more than
5,000 IOPS, you can still add multiple disks and aggregate them together inside the
guest OS in the same manner as with the regular Azure Storage. To use Premium
Storage, you must use the xS series VMs, such as the DS, FS, and GS series, and it is
possible for those series VMs to mix disks from both regular and Premium Storage
accounts.
At this point, you have a virtual machine with numerous configurations available. If a
virtual machine is no longer required, you can use the Delete option within the virtual
machine’s actions. When you delete a VM, its storage will not be deleted
automatically. Instead, the page BLOBs that contained the VHDs will need to be
manually deleted. Note that other resources, such as public IP addresses, Network
Security Groups, and vmNICs, are also not automatically deleted. While the Microsoft
Azure management portal is a great interface for managing Microsoft Azure virtual
machines, if users also access virtual machines in a private cloud, remember that you
can leverage System Center Orchestrator to integrate with Azure and then offer those
services out via Service Manager.
LEVERAGING AZURE STORAGE OUTSIDE OF VMs
This chapter has gone into a lot of detail about using Microsoft Azure Storage on
Microsoft Azure IaaS virtual machines. This section briefly covers other ways that
Microsoft Azure Storage can be used. Specifically, I want to tell you about two key
uses that I’ve found to be the most interesting for my customers.
The first is backup, because with Microsoft Azure Storage, you effectively have a
limitless amount of offsite storage, and Microsoft Azure provides the ability to create
backup vaults that can then be used by backup applications, including Windows
Backup (which is built into Windows Server) and System Center Data Protection
Manager (DPM). In the case of System Center DPM, the Microsoft Azure backup acts
as a secondary, offsite backup target in addition to the disk-based primary backup
target.
Microsoft has detailed instructions on configuring the Microsoft Azure backup vault,
creating the certificate required, and downloading and installing the Microsoft Azure
backup agent at the following location: