General availability: Azure Managed Disks and large scale sets

Azure Managed Disks is generally available. This new capability makes managing your VM disks much simpler. With Managed Disks, you specify only the desired disk type (Standard or Premium disk) and disk size, and Azure creates and manages the disk for you.

In addition, Managed Disks comes with enhanced virtual machine scale set capabilities, such as being able to define scale sets with attached data drives. You can create a scale set with up to 1,000 VMs—a 10× increase—from an Azure Marketplace image and 100 VMs from a custom image.

Managed Disks comes with the capability to migrate an existing VM created via the Azure Resource Manager deployment model to a VM with managed disks, with just a single reboot. You don’t have to worry about reconfiguring networking or security rules to start using this new capability.

Get started by programmatically creating a virtual machine with Managed Disks by using Azure PowerShell, the Azure command-line interface, or Azure management libraries for Java and .NET.

This service is available now in most of the Azure regions. Learn more about Managed Disks by checking our blog post.