This post will show you how to create a managed disk from a VHD blob file, such as one you’ve uploaded or restored from a virtual machine backup. In my example, I have restored the virtual hard disks of an Azure VM to a storage account called aidanfinnrestore. I am going to create a new managed disk from the VHD blob, and (in another post) create a new VM from the managed disk that I am creating in this post.
Open the Azure Portal, and go to Disks in the navigation bar on the left – this is where all managed disks are listed. Click + Add. A Create Manage Disk blade appears. Enter the following information:
- Name: Give the new managed disk a name. My naming standard names the disk after the VM with a suffix to denote a role. In my example, it’s an OS disk.
- Subscription: Select the subscription in your tenant. Note that you must create the managed disk in the same subscription as the storage account that contains the blob – you can always move the disk to a different subscription later.
- Resource Group: Restore the disk to a new or existing resource group – typically this is where the virtual machine will be.
- Location: Pick the region of the desired VM, which must also match the storage account.
- Account Type: What kind of managed disk do you want – Standard (HDD) or Premium (SSD). You can change this later, one of the nice features of managed disks.
- Source Type: I have selected Storage Blob – this is how the restored (or uploaded) VHD is stored.
- Source Blob: Click browse, and navigate to & select the VHD blob that was restored/uploaded.
- OS Type: If this is a data disk then select either Windows or Linux, depending on the guest OS in the VHD.
- Size: To make like easy, select the size of the existing blob. I restored a managed disk to a blob, so I went with the original size of 128 GiB.
Once you’re happy with all the settings, click Create. In my case, with a 128 GiB VHD, the creation just around 30 seconds:
Now you can either create a VM from the disk or attach it as a data disk to an existing VM in the Azure Portal – life is easy with managed disks!
Hi,
how do i achieve this creating a vm if i have a vhd uploaded to storage account i.e. unmanaged disk.
Hey RandomGuy,
You need to use these instructions to make the managed disk, choosing your OS Type during the creation. When it is done, there will be an option to create a VM at the top of the managed disk overview.
how can I create linux vm.
Once you create the managed disk, can you delete the vhd stored in the blog or are the two tied together? Hopefully that makes sense.
Might be a bit late but maybe for future people stumbling on this topic from google.
There is no connection between the created managed disk and the vhd file in the blob storage. After the managed disk is created you can safely remove the vhd file.
Thanks Edu,
This came in handy in October 2021.
Please can you advise how i would do the same in Az cli ? ie i have a vhd in a blob container. need to create a vm from that image. many thanks