Unmanaged or Managed Azure Disk for small tenants?

Question

For my graduate project i dove into Microsoft Azure and i had no clue how it worked. Now, a few months later, i need to make some decisions about Azure storage.

Case:

Small tenants (60 clients from a MSP) using AAD, AADDS and running 1/2 VM’s for RDS each. They will all kinda have the same setup

What is the best choice for storage in this case; use Managed Disks or Unmanaged Disks for RDS servers (used for user data from sessions). I did some research for the differences and found out Managed Disk are easier to use.

Can someone help me out: What are the main reasons to choose between managed/unmanaged disk?

Just a though: is it best practice to have 1 storage account (unmanaged disk) which all the tenants will use, like in a on-premise enviroment?

Answer 1

Actually it does not matter the size of your tenant, it really matters what your application/VM needs regarding a hard disk. The most important thing for me about it, Azure manages all disks for you, Highly durable and available, Integration with availability sets/zones, Azure Backup support, Disk snapshots and many options that you don't have when you are using unmanaged disk. More details about managed disk you can find here

Basically unmanaged disk you must handle by yourself, in case that an outage happens in Azure storage where your VHD disk lives, you can have your application down. It doesn't happen when using managed disk, Azure handles it for you and can migrate your disk to another storage behind the scene.

There are a lot of pages on Google about this question, this one is very useful to understand better. Please have a look at this page

Maybe when you are talking about costs, unmanaged disk can be cheaper, but technically speaking it is not worth. That's why you should think about your application/VM, what you should consider regarding options that you don't have when using unmanaged disk and you have when using managed disk.

You can consider upload your VHD disk to a storage blob and then convert it to a managed disk. You can easily create a VM from a VHD (unmanaged disk) and convert it to maanged disk. It is one of options to migrate VM from on-prime to Azure.