Azure Managed Disk Migration using the Azure Portal

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If like me you have been using Azure for some time you may have some servers still running with unmanaged disks. On the 2nd August 2018, Microsoft announced the ability to migrate unmanaged disks to managed disks using the Azure portal. You have been able to convert unmanaged disks to managed disks using PowerShell and the CLI, but for some servers, you may want greater visual feedback. Below you will find a recap of some of the benefits of Managed Disks and the steps needed to convert from unmanaged to managed disks.

Benefits of Managed Disks

• The ability to scale your application without worrying about storage account limits.
• The ability to align your compute and storage resources with to fault domains to help achieve high-availability.
• The ability to create VM Scale Sets with up to 1,000 instances.
• Integrate disks, snapshots, images as first-class resources into your architecture.
• The ability to secure your disks, snapshots, and images through Azure Role Based Access Control (RBAC)

To read more about the benefits of Managed Disks, see Azure Managed Disks Overview.

The Migration

Microsoft seems to have put in a lot of work behind the scenes to make the migration process very easy. The even have an info banner in the overview blade of an Azure VM using unmanaged disks.

Click on the info banner to launch the migration. A new blade will pop up.

Click on Migrate

The Virtual machine will now stop and deallocate to allow the migration to happen.

After some time in the notification blade, you see a message saying successfully migrated virtual machine

The VM will have started back up for you. If you go to the resource group that your VM is part of you will now see the managed disk.

To confirm that the new Managed disk is associated with the VM you can go to the VM blade and click Disks under the settings section. There you will be able to see that the managed disk is now associated.

I hope you found this article helpful if you have any questions or comments please leave them below or reach out using the usual methods.