data storage creation

Azure managed disks are block-level storage volumes that are managed by Azure and used with Azure Virtual Machines. Managed disks are like a physical disk in an on-premises server but, virtualized. With managed disks, all you have to do is specify the disk size, the disk type, and provision the disk. Once you provision the disk, Azure handles the rest.

The available types of disks are ultra disks, premium solid-state drives (SSD), standard SSDs, and standard hard disk drives (HDD). For information about each individual disk type, see Select a disk type for IaaS VMs.
Let us illustrate by listing the steps required to create a Data Disk for a Virtual Machine in Azure
a. create a virtual machine. See my blog here for the procedure to creating a virtual machine.

b. under the left pane, select disks.
c. Select create and attach a new disk
d. give the disk a name, select storage type and select the size
e. Click save

f. Go back to the virtual machine and click on connect so as to RDP into the virtual machine
g. Click select
h. Click 'Download RDP file'.

i. A small pop up window will show, click on connect
j. Fill in your credentials for username and password
k. Click 'Yes' on the pop up window that appears again
l. your virtual machine is running.

*Attaching the Data Disk created to the Virtual Machine *

1. Search for 'Disk Manager' in the search bar of the virtual machine
2. click on create and format Hard Disk partitions.
3. Click ok to initialize the disk.
4. Right click on the unallocated hard disk and click on 'New Simple Volume'.
5. Click on 'Next' on the pop up windows that are opened
6. on the format partition pop up window, change the volume label to the proposed name of your data disk and click next.
7. Click finish to set up your data disk.
8. The data disk is attached to the virtual machine. You can increase the size of your data disk anytime there is need, but you cannot reduce the size.