Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Managed Disks provide persistent, secured disk storage for Azure virtual machines. What's NOT possible with Azure Managed Disks: *  You can only increase the size of managed disks.  You cannot decrease/shrink disk size if it's accidentally over-provisioned. You can create a new disk with correct size and then copy the data from old disk. After that delete the old disk. *  The maximum number of disks you can attach to your VM cannot exceed the pre-defined limit for each type of VM *  SQL Server VMs running with datafiles directly on blob cannot leverage or utilize the features of Managed Disks *  Managed disks can be created only for virtual machines deployed using the Resource manager deployment model (not ASM) * It is not possible to add both managed and unmanaged disks to a VM that is in an availability set * ASR Azure to Azure protection is not supported for VMs with Managed Disks. It is going to be supported by the end of Q1 CY2018. * Stor...

In the informal & entertaining Azure Friday Talks, the inimitable Scott Hanselman chats up with Azure product team members on a variety of Azure topics in roughly 10 minutes. Takeaways from the discussion on Azure Backup * Why do you have to backup if every byte on Azure is already stored 3 times? - To protect against ransomware, corruption of data, human error, accidental deletion * Backup is an option within the VM experience * Recovery Services Vault (and not a Azure Storage account) is the centralized location that stores the backup. * Recovery Services Vault holds data for both Backup & DR * Recovery Services Vault is still connected to Azure Storage account but it is abstracted for user * Backup can be retained up to 99 years * You pay for Backup of each VM (~$10) and the storage consumed * Security PIN constantly updated every 5 minutes in the Azure Portal is required before a Azure Backup copy can be deleted * Backup allows you to restore both VHD...

This Week I Learned - * The new Azure Zone Redundant Storage (ZRS) (currently in public preview) is built over Availability Zones in Azure which provide resilience against failures through fault-isolated groups of datacenters within a single region. Zone Redundant Storage should be considered for applications where regional availability is critical and downtime is not acceptable, and both read and write access are required at all times. ZRS requires a general purpose v2 account. Effective immediately, the existing ZRS offering has been renamed to ZRS Classic and can continue to be accessed without any code change required - Azure Blog * Google introduced a cloud-computing service ( Cloud AutoML ) that it bills as a way to build a so-called computer vision system that suits your particular needs even if you have little or no experience with the concepts that drive it. If you are a radiologist, for example, you can use CT scans to automatically train a computer algorith...