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Can someone tell me the main benefits and differences between Managed disks and Unmanaged disks, various pros and cons of the managed and unmanaged disk and how best can I use this?
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Unmanaged disks are managed by Microsoft Cloud Services. In this case, you have a storage account and under this account one or more blobs (e.g vhd's). For unmanaged disks, there is a capacity limit of 500 TB per Storage Account. More details you can find in the link below : Introduction to Azure managed disks.
If you have existing Windows virtual machines (VMs) that use unmanaged disks, you can migrate the VMs to use managed disks through the Azure Managed Disks service. This process converts both the operating system (OS) disk and any attached data disks.
@NarinderVerma Yes, it is possible. You could encrypt an unmanaged VM, you could use Power Shell to do this, see this link docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/…
I would like to highlight some of the benefits of using managed disks:
Simple and scalable VM deployment: Managed Disks will allow you to create up to 10,000 VM disks in a subscription, which will enable you to create thousands of VMs in a single subscription.
Better reliability for Availability Sets: Managed Disks provides better reliability for Availability Sets by ensuring that the disks of VMs in an Availability Set are sufficiently isolated from each other to avoid single points of failure.
Highly durable and available.
Granular access control: You can use Azure Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) to assign specific permissions for a managed disk to one or more users. Managed Disks exposes a variety of operations, including read, write (create/update), delete, and retrieving a shared access signature (SAS) URI for the disk.
Azure Backup service support: Use Azure Backup service with Managed Disks to create a backup job with time-based backups, easy VM restoration and backup retention policies.
Are unmanaged disks still supported: Yes. Both support unmanaged and managed disks. We recommend that you use managed disks for new workloads and migrate your current workloads to managed disks.
Refer Azure Managed Disks Overview for more details.
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Essentially, Managed Disks are easier to use because they don't require you to create a storage account. I think Azure still creates one, but this detail is hidden from you.
The benefit of not having to manage a storage account is that storage accounts have limits, like max IOPS, so that if you place too many disks in a storage account, it is possible that you will reach the IOPS limit. Azure takes care of this for you.
If you have VMs in an Availability Set, Azure will make sure that disks are on different "stamps" ensuring that disks are spread out so that you don't have a single point of failure for the disks.
As for a Con, I've encountered two (but there are probably more):
When taking snapshots they are Full Snapshots, not incremental, so this adds to storage cost.
If you are setting up a Disaster Recovery between two Azure regions, using Recovery Services, managed disks are not yet supported.
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