Create an Azure Managed Disk from a VHD Blob

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.

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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:

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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!

Restore an Azure Virtual Machine’s Hard Disks

In this post, I’ll show you how to restore just the disks of an Azure virtual machine. This is useful if you want to restore a virtual machine to an availability set, or restore it as a different series/size.

Restoring to Availability Sets

For some reason that I do not know, we cannot restore a virtual machine to an availability set in Azure. It probably has something to do with the restriction in ARM that prevents a VM from being able to join an availability set after creation (vote for change here).

As a workaround, Azure Backup allows you to restore the disks, and then use those disks to create a new virtual machine (metadata) that is joined to the availability set. On the official docs pages, there is some pretty messy looking PowerShell to re-create the VM from those disks.

Thanks to some features of Managed Disks, if you have used managed disks for the VM, then you don’t need to go anywhere near that nasty PowerShell or JSON! I’ll post about that soon.

Restoring Disks

Browse to to the recovery services vault, open it, go to Backup Items > Azure Virtual Machine, and select the VM in question. Below is a screenshot of my web server in Azure. Click Restore VM.

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A blade with recovery points appears. Choose a restore point, i.e. a point in time from when you want to restore from, and click OK.

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The Restore Configuration blade appears. Choose Restore Disks as the Restore Type, and choose a storage account as the Staging Location. Click OK to start the backup job.

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Some time later, the disk(s) of the virtual machine are restored as blobs in a container in the storage account. You’ll also find a JSON file with details of the disk(s) that were restored.

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By the way, if you cannot tell which of the VHD blobs is your OS disk, download the JSON file and open it in Notepad (VS Code refuses to open it for me). The “osDisk” setting will tell you the path of the VHD blob that was the original data disk.

Microsoft’s solution would have you restore the virtual machine using PowerShell and that JSON file. I’ve read through it – it’s not pretty! My solution, in a later post, would create managed disks from the VHD blob(s), and then create a VM from the OS disk … and that’s nice and easy using the Azure Portal and a few mouse clicks.

Azure Low Cost “Burstable” CPU Virtual Machines

Microsoft has released pricing for a new kind of virtual machine in Azure, called the B-Series. The key traits of this VM type are:

  • It is 1/4 the price of a similar A_v2-Series machine.
  • The CPU runs at a low rate, and “bursts” on demand for higher capacity jobs.

I’d love to have more information to share, but all we have is all I stumbled upon in the pricing pages last week:

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As you can see in the names, they comply with the “new” format. That S in the names suggests that these machines support Premium (SSD) storage disks.

These are low end machines, as you can see by the entry level 1 core & 1 GB RAM model. The Microsoft VM pricing page says that they are good for:

… development and test servers, low traffic web servers, small databases, micro services, servers for proof-of-concepts, build servers, and code repositories.

The costs are really low. The B2S is just €20.71 per month, compared with €85.33 for the A2_v2 – both having 2 cores and 4 GB RAM. If you want a low end web server, then that’s a seriously cheap offering!

AWS does have something called T2 Instances. These are VMs that offer CPU burst-ability based on credits earned for low CPU utilization. The rough language of suitable roles is similar to that of the Azure B-Series. However, we have no detailed information on the B-Series yet – my bet is that will be published on September 25th (Ignite day 1).

Azure VM Sizes Missing When Resizing

When you are resizing a running virtual machine, you might find that many sizes are not available. There is a workaround – shut the VM down! Here’s how I resized the Azure virtual machine that hosts this site, which started the day as an A2_v2 virtual machine.

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First, I powered down the VM in the Azure Portal. Then I browsed to Size. All of the possible sizes were presented to me then. I selected a DS2_v2 Promo size, knowing that the price will increase to normal DS2_v2 pricing once the D3 is live in North Europe (I’ll upgrade then).

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I clicked OK, and then powered up the VM.

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Inspire 2017 Day 1 Keynote

What We Know So Far

There’s been lots of talk and sharing about Azure Stack. Lenovo and HPE have opened up orders. Microsoft has also announced availability of the Azure Stack Development Kit, the free single-server deployment (what we saw in the Preview program).

A DJ is DJ-ing on a Surface Studio and tells us to turn off our phones. And now we get an inspirational video on MS and Washington. Then someone talks about mountain climbing and dreams and stuff.

Ron Puddleston – One Commercial Partner VP

Over 17,000 people at the keynote – or trying to get in because security is supposed to be creating a nightmare there. Lots of “partners are great” and “partners are great”.

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Partner feedback, according to him, was the MS wanted one way to be in contact with MS, and one way to interact with customers. They wanted one voice to advocate for them. And that’s why MS created “One Commercial Partner” group from SMS&P, EPG and other organizations last week. It’s to be “partner first”. It’s supposed to be simple and aligned to how partners work:

  • Build the business
  • Go to market
  • Sell with partners to customers

That’s supposed to be what OCP (sounds like Robocop) does. They are measured on partner growth, not individual product sales. They’re investing €250,000,000 to connect partners with customers. The GM is to connect partners to customers – this is not a partner account manager as the past. He says “the right partner for the customer” – big emphasis this FY by Inside Sales on partners with competencies. Two new things:

  • Focus on Azure billed revenue caused frictions for partners. Azure consumed revenue is now the goal. That only affects EA customers because they’re the same in CSP.
  • MS reps will be recognized for 10% of the value of co-sold ISV products.

One partner team will offer all this.

Satya Nadella

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He says the partner conference sets the tone for the rest of the MS financial year – it’s a highlight for him. 140 countries represented at the conference. There are currently 17 million jobs around the world because of MS partners. There are 64,000 partners leading with cloud solutions. Partners coming into the MS cloud from other ecosystems: Linux, Hadoop, Java.

They’ve been talking about mobile first/cloud first for years and been getting loads of feedback from MS partners’ digital transformation stories. Moving towards Intelligent Cloud/Intelligent Edge. 3 characteristics:

  1. Every experience that is built is multi-device and multi-sense. Might be speech on one, ink on another, touch on another.
  2. Infusion of AI – in every application experience that will be built. An autonomous car will generate 4 GB of data per second. That’s one car per second. That data has “gravity”. AI is being distributed to devices, not just in data centres.
  3. Managing all of this complexity requires a new efficient frontier for application development, distribution and management. This is about serverless tech, such as containers, functions, logic apps, etc.

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The opportunity is bigger than ever before and growing. Microsoft has a history of jumping on platform shifts. The PC was democratized. Then client/server. There is $4.5 trillion of spend here. The product and the service are digital.

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We will all thrive if we do the above by geography and by industry. Modern Workplace, etc above, are the framework.

Modern Workplace is where he starts. Empower people inside of your organization – brings a shift in culture and the early signal of digital transformation. Lots of CEOs in a video about changing business to be self-empowered, nimble, competitive, creative, etc.

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The demographics of the workplace are changing. Skills are changing. How teams come together is changing. Teams are dynamic, traditional IT is not. Bring the systems into one simple framework. Need sophistication to protect the many endpoints for user access and data flow. Need operational insight to detect and respond to attacks.

Microsoft 365

Coming together of Office 365, Windows 10, and EMS. Two offerings: Enterprise (was Secure Compute Enterprise SKU) and Business (for SMEs).The 4 pillars are:

  • Creativity
  • Teamwork
  • Simplicity
  • Security

Demo coming up. Sonia Dara starts with an iPhone-base demo.

I had to leave at this point for a customer Skype call … interesting timing Smile

Upcoming Webinar: 4 Important Azure IaaS features for building your Hybrid Cloud

I’m going to be presenting in a webinar by Altaro on July 18th. It’s an interesting topic, Azure, because lots of IT pros are wondering if/how they’ll use Azure and how they should get started. As an IT pro, your first ventures into The Cloud will probably be infrastructure, so I’ll talk about a few topics that will hopefully get you better prepared.

Altaro has a big audience around the world, so the webinar will be run twice:

  • Time for EU attendees: (2pm CEST)
  • Time for US attendees: (10am PDT / 1pm EDT)

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Azure Backup Central Reporting – Pay Attention MS Partners!

Microsoft has launched a preview of Azure Backup Reporting; this is a solution where you can export backup data to Power BI, and this allows you to consume, visualize, and subscribe to information about backup from many recovery services vaults in many subscriptions.

The way the system works is that you configure the recovery services vault to export data regularly to a storage account (must be in the same tenant as the recovery services vault).

Configure storage account step 3

You then sign into Power BI (a free subscription can be used but this is limited to 1 GB of data) and import the Azure Backup content pack.

Import content pack

Data is exported as JSON files into a folder (container) in the storage account, and Power BI will consume/process that data. The timing of this varies on the data, but Microsoft advises that it can take 24 hours for your first data sets to be consumed.

Azure Backup Reports data push frequency

The default screens show lots of useful information:

  • Summary of job health
  • Cloud storage usage
  • Quantities of instances
  • Cloud storage growth trends

Azure Backup dashboard

While the solution is not perfect yet (read more and vote here) it can be used today. Note that DPM, MABS, and Azure VM backup are not supported yet by the preview. I have set up 3 demo subscriptions (each in a different tenant as is normal for deployments by MS partners), each with a MARS backup job. I imported the Azure Backup content pack 3 times, 1 for each tenant. I made a custom report for each subscription and pinned them to a single dashboard. Now I can see the results of each and every backup job in one screen. I can also create daily/weekly email subscriptions to each report – that means I can send out these reports to my customers!

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I can also publish the reports either to a web site or a private SharePoint (including Online) site – here’s an example that I did for work.

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The end result is that we finally have a centralized reporting solution for Azure Backup. With one quick scroll, I can easily see the health of all of my customers’ backups.

Year 10 as an MVP – Adding The Azure Expertise

Today was a stressful day – it was the annual date of my MVP renewal. The program has changed quite a bit in the last year, and this is the only renewal date from now on, so you might have seen more MVPs than usual sharing their nerves online.

I was extremely nervous, especially because my profile on the MVP directory went offline. I was sure that I was a goner. But later in the day my profile re-appeared, with a change.

NewMVPStatus

To mark year 10 as a Microsoft Valuable Professional, I have been awarded with a double expertise:

  • Cloud & Datacenter Management (Hyper-V)
  • Microsoft Azure

And a little later in the afternoon, the notification email arrived:

MVP2017Email

My eldest daughter, who is 10 years old, had noticed my stress and wanted to congratulate me. I was banished from the kitchen and later I was presented with this cake – I’m a proud Dad:

MVP10Cake

 

These are fun times ahead for IT pros. My double status, with on-premises virtualization and public cloud, mirrors what’s going on in many of our careers, either already or pretty soon.  My career has changed so much over the years:

  • UNIX programmer
  • Have-a-go-hero Windows consultant
  • Re-inventing myself to be a better Microsoft engineer
  • Senior sysadmin in an international company
  • MVP in SCCM
  • Virtualization engineer
  • MVP in Hyper-V
  • Author
  • Technical sales
  • Writer
  • Lead on Azure IaaS
  • MVP in Azure

And now I can see somewhat of a return to development. I don’t see myself coding, but I’m heading to Ignite with the intention of spending as much time as posisble learning PaaS stuff, while trying to figure out what’s happening in Windows Server 1709, Azure IaaS developments, and soooo much more!