In this tutorial we are going to see how to attach an empty disk in a Windows Azure Virtual Machine environment. Initially when we configure Virtual Machine we can see some inbuilt storage available which can be used to install the necessary software that are required to run the application, but basically we used to have our own data disk attached to store the application data separately compared to the system data. The data disk can be maintained separately in the storage where we can download to local environment anytime.
With Windows Azure Virtual machine we have flexibility to attach an existing data disk that has been used by the application till now in any environment or we can create and attach a new empty disk as per our requirement. We can attach a data disk to the Virtual Machine environment based on the Size of the virtual machine it is limited as for a Extra Small instance we can attach only 1 data disk, where are for a Small Instance (2), Medium Instance (4), Large Instance (8) and Extra Large Instance (16). Let us see the steps, how to attach an empty disk to the virtual environment. [more]
Steps:
Open Windows Azure Management Portal with the subscription and go to the Virtual Machine where we have used the machine for the last few articles in this series which is (milesvm) that is listed in the virtual machine section as shown in the screen below.
In the bottom tool bar we can see an option Attach, click on that and it will have option to Attach an empty disk or Attach available disk. Since we don’t have any available disk it shows the option to Attach an Empty disk as shown in the screen below.
Clicking on Attach Empty Disk will open a new Windows where we enter the details of the disk with the amount of storage and the storage medium as shown in the screen below.
Clicking on the proceed button will start attaching an empty disk to the Virtual Environment as shown in the screen below.
It will take some time to attach the disk to the virtual machine based on the storage capacity we specify. Once the disk is attached successfully we can see the status message as shown in the screen below.
Also in the Dashboard we can see the attached Data disk and the count of the Disk as shown in the screen below.
Next step is to initialize the data disk from the Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine, so let us login to the machine (Check on how to do that using this article Windows Azure Virtual Machines – Meet Azure Edition) and open the Server Manager in which select storage and Disk Management option. Clicking on Disk Management will open a pop up indicating that it has a disk available as shown in the screen below.
Now click OK and then right click on the Disk 2 at the bottom of the storage list and select New Simple volume which will make the storage data disk available to the server as shown in the screen below.
We can see a simple wizard that opens which is used to initialize the data disk as shown in the screen below. Proceed with the wizard and it can be used to initialize the data disk using the default values.
Once the initialization is done we can see the data volume available to the storage listing as shown in the screen below.
That’s it from this short tutorial, please follow me on Facebook and Twitter to get the latest updates on the technology front and the tutorials.