Attach a data disk to a Windows VM with PowerShell
Applies to: ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets
This article shows you how to attach both new and existing disks to a Windows virtual machine by using PowerShell.
First, review these tips:
- The size of the virtual machine controls how many data disks you can attach. For more information, see Sizes for virtual machines.
- To use premium SSDs, you'll need a premium storage-enabled VM type, like the DS-series or GS-series virtual machine.
This article uses PowerShell within the Azure Cloud Shell, which is constantly updated to the latest version. To open the Cloud Shell, select Try it from the top of any code block.
Lower latency
In select regions, the disk attach latency has been reduced, so you'll see an improvement of up to 15%. This is useful if you have planned/unplanned failovers between VMs, you're scaling your workload, or are running a high scale stateful workload such as Azure Kubernetes Service. However, this improvement is limited to the explicit disk attach command, Add-AzVMDataDisk
. You won't see the performance improvement if you call a command that may implicitly perform an attach, like Update-AzVM
. You don't need to take any action other than calling the explicit attach command to see this improvement.
Lower latency is currently available in every public region except for:
- Canada Central
- Central US
- East US
- East US 2
- South Central US
- West US 2
- Germany North
- India West
- North Europe
- West Europe
Add an empty data disk to a virtual machine
This example shows how to add an empty data disk to an existing virtual machine.
Using managed disks
$rgName = 'myResourceGroup'
$vmName = 'myVM'
$location = 'East US'
$storageType = 'Premium_LRS'
$dataDiskName = $vmName + '_datadisk1'
$diskConfig = New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName $storageType -Location $location -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128
$dataDisk1 = New-AzDisk -DiskName $dataDiskName -Disk $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName $rgName
$vm = Get-AzVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName
$vm = Add-AzVMDataDisk -VM $vm -Name $dataDiskName -CreateOption Attach -ManagedDiskId $dataDisk1.Id -Lun 1
Update-AzVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName
Using managed disks in an Availability Zone
To create a disk in an Availability Zone, use New-AzDiskConfig with the -Zone
parameter. The following example creates a disk in zone 1.
$rgName = 'myResourceGroup'
$vmName = 'myVM'
$location = 'East US 2'
$storageType = 'Premium_LRS'
$dataDiskName = $vmName + '_datadisk1'
$diskConfig = New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName $storageType -Location $location -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128 -Zone 1
$dataDisk1 = New-AzDisk -DiskName $dataDiskName -Disk $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName $rgName
$vm = Get-AzVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName
$vm = Add-AzVMDataDisk -VM $vm -Name $dataDiskName -CreateOption Attach -ManagedDiskId $dataDisk1.Id -Lun 1
Update-AzVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName
Initialize the disk
After you add an empty disk, you'll need to initialize it. To initialize the disk, you can sign in to a VM and use disk management. If you enabled WinRM and a certificate on the VM when you created it, you can use remote PowerShell to initialize the disk. You can also use a custom script extension:
$location = "location-name"
$scriptName = "script-name"
$fileName = "script-file-name"
Set-AzVMCustomScriptExtension -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Location $locName -VMName $vmName -Name $scriptName -TypeHandlerVersion "1.4" -StorageAccountName "mystore1" -StorageAccountKey "primary-key" -FileName $fileName -ContainerName "scripts"
The script file can contain code to initialize the disks, for example:
Note
The example script uses MBR partition style. If your disk is two tebibytes (TiB) or larger, you must use GPT partitioning. If it's under two TiB, you can use either MBR or GPT.
$disks = Get-Disk | Where partitionstyle -eq 'raw' | sort number
$letters = 70..89 | ForEach-Object { [char]$_ }
$count = 0
$labels = "data1","data2"
foreach ($disk in $disks) {
$driveLetter = $letters[$count].ToString()
$disk |
Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle MBR -PassThru |
New-Partition -UseMaximumSize -DriveLetter $driveLetter |
Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel $labels[$count] -Confirm:$false -Force
$count++
}
Attach an existing data disk to a VM
You can attach an existing managed disk to a VM as a data disk.
$rgName = "myResourceGroup"
$vmName = "myVM"
$dataDiskName = "myDisk"
$disk = Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -DiskName $dataDiskName
$vm = Get-AzVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName
$vm = Add-AzVMDataDisk -CreateOption Attach -Lun 0 -VM $vm -ManagedDiskId $disk.Id
Update-AzVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName
Next steps
You can also deploy managed disks using templates. For more information, see Using Managed Disks in Azure Resource Manager Templates or the quickstart template for deploying multiple data disks.