4TB disk sizes for Azure IaaS VMs available
Microsoft has introduced two new disk sizes for Azure IaaS VMs in P40 (2TB) and P50 (4TB) for both managed and unmanaged Premium Disks and S40 (2TB) and S50 (4TB) for both managed and unmanaged Standard Disks. This enables customers to add 4x more disk storage capacity per VM. Customers can now provision up to a total of 256TB disk storage on a GS5 VM using 64 disks with 4TB capacity. This means the max SQL Server database size on a Azure VM goes from 64TB to 256TB!
| Premium Disks | Standard Disks | |
| Managed Disks | P40, P50 | S40, S50 |
| Unmanaged Disks | P40, P50 | Max up to 4,095GB |
Larger Premium Disks P40 and P50 will support your IO intensive workload and therefore offer higher provisioned disk performance. The maximum Premium Disk IOPS and bandwidth is increased to 7,500 IOPS and 250 MBps respectively. Standard Disks, of all sizes, will offer up to 500 IOPS and 60 MBps.
| P40 | P50 | S40 | S50 | |
| Disk Size | 2048GB | 4095GB | 2048GB | 4095GB |
| Disk IOPS | 7,500 IOPS | 7,500 IOPS | Up to 500 IOPS | Up to 500 IOPS |
| Disk Bandwidth | 250 MBps | 250 MBps | Up to 60 MBps | Up to 60 MBps |
You can create a larger disk or resize existing disks to larger disk sizes with your existing Azure tools through Azure Resource Manager (ARM) or the Azure Portal. Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery support for larger disks is coming soon (current timeline is before end of July).
You can visit the Managed Disk Pricing and unmanaged Disk Pricing pages for more details about pricing.
More info:
Azure increases the maximum size and performance of Azure Disks
Seems like a sucker’s bet, though. Sure, the P50 has 4x the capacity (4TB as opposed to 1TB) of a P30, but … only 25% better throughput? Backups are going to suuuuck on that thing. Seems so much better to get four P30s in an array, getting yourself 800 MB/sec throughput instead of 250 MB/sec.
Depends … Quantity of disks allowed are governed by the size of the VM. So there is a limit eventually on exactly how many you can add.