Change your performance tier without downtime using the Azure PowerShell module or the Azure CLI

Applies to: ✔️ Linux VMs ✔️ Windows VMs ✔️ Flexible scale sets

The performance of your Azure managed disk is set when you create your disk, in the form of its performance tier. The performance tier determines the IOPS and throughput your managed disk has. When you set the provisioned size of your disk, a performance tier is automatically selected. The performance tier can be changed at deployment or afterwards, without changing the size of the disk and without downtime. To learn more about performance tiers, see Performance tiers for managed disks.

Changing your performance tier has billing implications. See Billing impact for details.

Restrictions

• This feature is currently supported only for premium SSD managed disks.
• This feature isn't currently supported with shared disks.
• The P60, P70, and P80 performance tiers can only be used by disks that are larger than 4,096 GiB.
• A disk's performance tier can be downgraded only once every 12 hours.
• The system does not return Performance Tier for disks created before June 2020. You can take advantage of Performance Tier for an older disk by updating it with the baseline Tier.

Prerequisites

Azure CLI

Install the latest Azure CLI and sign in to an Azure account with az login.

PowerShell

Install the latest Azure PowerShell version, and sign in to an Azure account in with Connect-AzAccount.

Create an empty data disk with a tier higher than the baseline tier

Azure CLI

subscriptionId=<yourSubscriptionIDHere>
resourceGroupName=<yourResourceGroupNameHere>
diskName=<yourDiskNameHere>
diskSize=<yourDiskSizeHere>
performanceTier=<yourDesiredPerformanceTier>
region=westcentralus

az account set --subscription $subscriptionId

az disk create -n $diskName -g $resourceGroupName -l $region --sku Premium_LRS --size-gb $diskSize --tier $performanceTier

Create an OS disk with a tier higher than the baseline tier from an Azure Marketplace image

resourceGroupName=<yourResourceGroupNameHere>
diskName=<yourDiskNameHere>
performanceTier=<yourDesiredPerformanceTier>
region=westcentralus
image=Canonical:UbuntuServer:18.04-LTS:18.04.202002180

az disk create -n $diskName -g $resourceGroupName -l $region --image-reference $image --sku Premium_LRS --tier $performanceTier

PowerShell

$subscriptionId='yourSubscriptionID'
$resourceGroupName='yourResourceGroupName'
$diskName='yourDiskName'
$diskSizeInGiB=4
$performanceTier='P50'
$sku='Premium_LRS'
$region='westcentralus'

Connect-AzAccount

Set-AzContext -Subscription $subscriptionId

$diskConfig = New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName $sku -Location $region -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB $diskSizeInGiB -Tier $performanceTier
New-AzDisk -DiskName $diskName -Disk $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName

Update the tier of a disk without downtime

Azure CLI

1. Update the tier of a disk even when it is attached to a running VM

   resourceGroupName=<yourResourceGroupNameHere>
   diskName=<yourDiskNameHere>
   performanceTier=<yourDesiredPerformanceTier>
   
   az disk update -n $diskName -g $resourceGroupName --set tier=$performanceTier
   

PowerShell

1. Update the tier of a disk even when it is attached to a running VM

   $resourceGroupName='yourResourceGroupName'
   $diskName='yourDiskName'
   $performanceTier='P1'
   
   $diskUpdateConfig = New-AzDiskUpdateConfig -Tier $performanceTier
   
   Update-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -DiskName $diskName -DiskUpdate $diskUpdateConfig
   

Show the tier of a disk

Azure CLI

az disk show -n $diskName -g $resourceGroupName --query [tier] -o tsv

PowerShell

$disk = Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $resourceGroupName -DiskName $diskName

$disk.Tier

Next steps

If you need to resize a disk to take advantage of the higher performance tiers, see these articles:

• Expand virtual hard disks on a Linux VM with the Azure CLI
• Expand a managed disk attached to a Windows virtual machine