I have never really considered my self a System Administrator, but I am familiar enough with the Windows Operating System to consider myself a little dangerous. However, with more and more of our clients utilizing the power of Microsoft Azure VMs I see my role as a SQL Consultant starting in encompass System Administrator duties.

Recently a client found this article on “Best Practices for SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines” and wanted to re-provision his volumes to adhere to them.

No my first thoughts was wait, I’m a DBA, not a System Admin that’s not my role! But thinking more about it I realized the client views this as a SQL Server issue and I am the SQL Server Consultant and that it is my job to remedy this problem.

Not being 100% confident in Azure, I spun up a VM SQL Server and attempted to add some volumes.  To my surprise, this was way too easy.

After selecting the server I wanted to manage….

Step 1:    Select Disk on the left menu and then click “+ Add Data Disk” 

Step 2: Configure Disk

• You will need to provide a name or you can use the pre-populated name
• Select Source Type, in this case I left it at the default “New (empty disk)”
• Select Account Type, again, left it at the default of “Premium (SSD)”
• Choose the Size.  From 0 t0 1023 which is a Terabyte of space.
• Select Storage Container.  This will open another tab and just pick the one you want or create a new one
• Storage Blob name – once again you can use the pre-populated name

Step 3: Select a Container

This is where the actual VHD file will reside, you can use an existing container or create a new one for these files

 

That’s it!  That is all that is need to mount a new volume to an existing VM SQL Server. It automatically populates in the OS Disk Management where you will need to create a “Simple Volume” (or however you would like to do it) and format the drive (remember MSFT recommends 64K for data and log drives)

You are now ready to do. 

And removing an existing drive is even easer.  At the top of the Disk Panel is the work “Edit” click there and you are given the option to delete. It will automatically remove it from your server, no reboot no warning!  So be careful.

Heck, maybe being a System Administrator in Azure isn’t so tough after all!