There are many reasons to have your Disks stored at separate Storage Accounts, per Cloud Service. One is that a Storage Account in Azure provides 20000 IOPS and every disk in Standard Tier 500 IOPS. Azure support suggests to don’t have more than 40 disks per Storage Account. Also you may want to have your disks lined (go to Azure, Cloud Services, selsect a Cloud Service and you can see the “Lined Resources” tab, there you can link storage accounts to the Cloud Service) to the same Cloud Services as their VMs. The problem is that if you have an Azure VM and you try to “attach an empty disk” you will realize that the disk will be created at the default Storage Account of the Subscription and there is no option to change this.
Here is a PowerShell command that creates a VHD at a specified Storage Account, creates a Disk and attaches it to a VM:
Get-AzureVM "servicename -Name "vmname" | Add-AzureDataDisk -CreateNew -DiskSizeInGB XXX -DiskLabel "diskname" -MediaLocation "https://storageaccountname.blob.core.windows.net/vhds/vhdname.vhd" -LUN X | Update-AzureVM
Some more info:
First of all you need to connect to your Azure Subscription, you can follow this Post on how to do it.
Then create a Storage Account using the GUI or PowerShell, here is the Microsoft’s link http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-create-storage-account/
Then you need to list the disks that are already connected to your VM in order to view the LUN number that you will use. The OS disk is not listed on this command. The first data disk consumes the LUN 0, the second the LUN 1 and so on. The command is:
Get-AzureVM -ServiceName "servicename" -Name "vmname" | Get-AzureDataDisk
Pantelis Apostolidis is a Sr. Specialist, Azure at Microsoft and a former Microsoft Azure MVP. For the last 20 years, Pantelis has been involved to major cloud projects in Greece and abroad, helping companies to adopt and deploy cloud technologies, driving business value. He is entitled to a lot of Microsoft Expert Certifications, demonstrating his proven experience in delivering high quality solutions. He is an author, blogger and he is acting as a spokesperson for conferences, workshops and webinars. He is also an active member of several communities as a moderator in azureheads.gr and autoexec.gr. Follow him on Twitter @papostolidis.
