Today, we’re announcing Public Preview support for Azure Premium Storage. Azure Premium Storage is a new type of SSD-based storage, designed to support I/O intensive workloads. With Premium Storage, you can provision a persistent disk and configure the size and performance characteristics that will meet your requirements. You can then attach several Premium Storage-backed data disks to a VM, stripe across them and deliver to your applications up to 32 TB of storage per VM with more than 50,000 IOPS per VM with extremely low latencies. For more information on Premium Storage, see Premium Storage Overview.
Here’s how to get started with a new Premium Storage-backed Virtual Machine.
Sign-Up for the Public Preview
To start, sign up for the Public Preview.
You will be notified when you have access to the Premium Storage preview.
Create the Premium Storage Account
Navigate to the Azure Portal and select New –> Everything –> Storage, Cache, + backup and select Storage.
From there, choose a name for the Storage Account, select the Premium-LRS pricing tier, and hit Create.
Note: Initially, Premium Storage will be available in the following locations: West US, East US 2, and West Europe.
Create Premium Storage-Backed Virtual Machine
Next, select New –> Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter Virtual Machine.
In the configuration blade, select one of the new Standard_DS Virtual Machine sizes.
| Size | Cores | Memory | Disk (GB) |
| Standard_DS1 | 1 | 3.5 | 7 |
| Standard_DS2 | 2 | 7 | 14 |
| Standard_DS3 | 4 | 14 | 28 |
| Standard_DS4 | 8 | 28 | 56 |
| Standard_DS11 | 2 | 14 | 28 |
| Standard_DS12 | 4 | 28 | 56 |
| Standard_DS13 | 8 | 56 | 112 |
| Standard_DS14 | 16 | 112 | 224 |
These sizes are equivalent to the D-series Virtual Machine sizes in memory, processor, and pricing. The one difference that sets the DS-Series apart from the D-series is how the local SSD space is used. The D-series VMs provide 50GB – 800GB of local SSD space to be used as temporary storage. The DS-Series VMs will use 25% of the local SSD to provide temporary storage for the Virtual Machine. The remaining 75% of the local SSD available for the VM will be used to provide an efficient data cache for persistent disks using premium storage. The DS-Series of VMs are currently the only VM sizes that support persistent disks backed by Premium Storage.
For specs, see Virtual Machine and Cloud Service Sizes for Azure.
Note: Initially, Premium Storage will be available in the following locations: West US, East US 2, and West Europe.
Under the Optional Configuration blade, select the Premium Storage Account you created earlier.
Click Create.
Premium Storage and Azure PowerShell
Premium storage accounts and DS-Series VMs can be created through Azure Powershell as well as the Preview Portal. To create premium storage accounts or DS-Series VMs through Powershell, you must first install the current release (as of December 11th, 2014) of the Microsoft Azure Powershell Tools. Then when you create a storage account set the type to Premium_LRS, and then select a VM size of Standard_DS1 – Standard_DS14.
New-AzureStorageAccount -StorageAccountName "premiumstorageaccount" -Location "West US" -Type Premium_LRS