Moving a disk in Azure that’s in Managed Storage

We’ve been using Azure for several years now at DCAC. Back when we started in Azure their were no PaaS services for MySQL (there was but it was stupid expensive, and from a third party). When we created VMs we put some in US West and some in US Central. Now that we’ve been able to move all our web properties from IaaS to PaaS we wanted to consolidate the VMs into one region so we could kill the site to site VPN (and save the $50 a month we were spending on keeping the VPN Gateway up). This required moving some VMs from US Central to US West as there’s a couple of VMs that we need to keep and I’m to lazy to set back up.

We ended up needing to move two VMs from US Central to US West. 1 has standard disks and one is a managed disk. The question became how to move these. The answer was using Start-AzStorageBlobCopy. The command is fairly straight forward.

$sourcekey = “17SZrnd…Q==”
$destkey = “UUSkMu…A==”
$sourceContext = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountKey $sourcekey -StorageAccountName SourceName
$destinationContext = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountKey $destkey -StorageAccountName DestinationAccountName
Start-AzStorageBlobCopy -Context $sourceContext -DestContext $destinationContext -SrcContainer vhds -DestContainer vhds -SrcBlob “VMdisk0.vhd” -DestBlob “VMDisk0.vhd”

Now this will nicely handle the VM that’s in a storage account. So how to do handle the VM that’s no in a storage account? Pretty much the same way with Start-AzStorageBlobCopy, there’s just a different parameter to use. Let’s look at that code.

$destkey = “UUSkMu…A==”
$destinationContext = New-AzStorageContext -StorageAccountKey $destkey -StorageAccountName DestinationAccountName
Start-AzStorageBlobCopy -AbsoluteUri “https://md-h1fl3bgpqvq3.blob.core.windows.net/f1mx3lrkhl1q/abcd?sv=2017-04-17&sr=b&si=994de0ad-04eb-46a7-8d91-62e827064bf4&sig=Q…3D” -DestContext $destinationContext -DestContainer vhds -DestBlob “VMdisk0.vhd”

Now, the first question is how to we get that URI that we need to pass in. First you’ll want to stop and delete the VM (don’t worry, this won’t delete the disk for the VM). Then in the Azure Portal find Disks and select the disk that you want to copy. On the menu that opens when you select the disk, you’ll see a “Disk Export” option. Select that. It’ll ask you how long you want to create a SAS key for. It defaults to 3600 seconds, I changed it to 7200 seconds to give it plenty of time, then click the Generage URL button. When that’s done it’ll give you a SAS URL (don’t close the window until you’ve copied the URL as the portal will only show it to you once). Take that URL and drop it into the AbsoluteUri parameter of Start-AzStorageBlobCopy.

Now these commands are going to take a while to run, and we want to see how far along they are. We can do that with another simple PowerShell cmdlet.
Get-AzStorageBlobCopyState -Blob “VMdisk0.vhd” -Context $destinationContext -Container vhds -WaitForComplete

This command throws a nice message up in my PowerShell window and the PowerShell window waits for the copy of the file to complete. The really nice thing about Start-AzStorageBlobCopy is that is doesn’t download the blob, all the copying happens in Azure so the copy is actually pretty quick.
Once this is done you have your data file sitting in a storage account, so you need to move it back into managed storage. This can be done in the GUI, unless you really want to do this in PowerShell.

Simply go into the disks section of the Azure Portal, and create a new disk (the plus right in the upper left). When the next screen opens one of the questions will be what the source of the new disk should be. One of the answers to this will be Storage Blob, you’ll want to select this option.
After you set the blob (there’s a GUI, use it, love it) make sure you set the OS of the disk and the correct size, and the performance tier (HDD, BSSD, PSSD) and click OK. Once that’s done, select your new disk and you can create a new VM based off of the disk. Once that’s done your VM is up and running in the new site. (Don’t forget to delete the old disk after you ensure the new VM is working as you don’t want to get charged for the old disk any more.)

Denny

The post Moving a disk in Azure that’s in Managed Storage appeared first on SQL Server with Mr. Denny.

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One Response

  1. The workaround is to export a snapshot of the VMs managed disks to a storage account in a different region, and then re-create the VM with the managed disk(s) in a Resource Group in the different region.

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