2018-12-12: How to increase Azure VM disk performance

Why?

I wanted to update the Visual Studio 2017 installation in a default Azure VM, but ran out of disk storage when using the default disk size at 127GB since I also had Docker for Windows installed.

The how

Then I figured out that Docker for Windows Hyper-V image was using 30GB+, so I decreased the size to 16GB:

And I also increased the Azure VM disk size, because I just wanted to, and discovered something useful.

The disk estimated performance went from:

to this with just an increace from 127 to 200GB:

When I increaced the disk size I got a whole lot more IOPS and MB/s. It's ok that it would probably cost more, but I wonder how much. Too good to be true?

The cost

As with AWS and Azure, the only practical way to accurately see what everything is actually going to cost is to set something up, wait a few hours or days and then see how much money Azure wants back for services rendered.

It turns out that this costs a whole lot too. After one day I go into Azure and see:

This leads me here:

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/page-blobs/

That's an 3.7x increase. So, by throwing money at Azure I am gaining more performance That's not a big surprise. The same goes for unmanaged disks as well.

Even though I only increased to 200GB, I still get the P20 disk.