The Azure Data Box offline family lets you transfer hundreds of terabytes of data to Microsoft Azure in a quick, inexpensive, and reliable manner. We are excited to share that support for managed disks is now available across the Azure Data Box family of devices, which includes Data Box, Data Box Disk, and Data Box Heavy.
With managed disks support on Data Box, you can now move your on-premises virtual hard disks (VHDs) as managed disks in Azure with one simple step. This allows you to save a significant amount of time in lift and shift migration scenarios.
How do managed disks work with Data Box solution?
The Data Box family supports the following managed disk types: Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. When you place your order for any of the Data Box data transfer solutions in the Azure portal, you can now select your storage destination as managed disks and specify the resource groups for ingestion. You will be asked to select a staging storage account, which is used to stage VHDs as page blobs and to then convert page blobs to managed disks.
When your Data Box device arrives, it will have the shares or folders corresponding to the selected resource groups. These shares or folders are further broken down by managed disk storage types – Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD. Copying your data to the target managed disk type is as easy as copying the VHDs to the corresponding folders using utility like robocopy or just drag and drop.
For more information on movement to managed disks, please refer to the following,
- Data Box documentation for managed disks, “Tutorial: Use Data Box to import data as managed disks in Azure.”
- Data Box Disk documentation for managed disks, “Tutorial: Copy data to Azure Data Box Disk and verify.”
You can also place an order for a Data Box today and import your VHDs as managed disks. Please continue to provide your valuable thoughts and comments by posting on Azure Feedback.
