Is there any VM size that has access to a RAID controller?

Question

Hello everyone,
I'm new to Azure (and VM's in general) so apologies if this is a rather silly question, but I have been tasked to set up a VM in Azure running Windows server 2019 or newer in order for our implementation team to experiment with some software that one of our suppliers has provided us.

The system requirements are as follows:

• Minimum of 20 GB storage
• 64-bit operating system for servers
• SAS- or SSD-harddisks
• RAID-controller with "battery backed write cache / flash backed write cache"
• Gigabit NIC
• Recent 64-bit Intel Xeon multi-core processor (minimun 2.00 GHz)

Is it possible for Azure VMs to have a RAID controller (specifically with battery and/or flash backed write cache!) ? Or is it only possible to have make use of software RAID due to the VMs nature?

I don't know what the hardware architecture looks like so I don't know if this makes sense at all; again sorry if it doesn't.

Kind regards,

Algernon

Answer 1

Hi,

For Azure VM disks there is no hardware RAID controller like you might have with a physical server on premises. It is preferred that you use Managed Disk(s) for the OS and data disk(s). Your redundancy options are Locally-Redundant Storage (LRS) which translates to 3 copies of your data stored in same datacenter as VM or Zone-Redundant Storage (ZRS) which typically translates to total of 9 copies of your data, 3 copies in same datacenter and 3 copies in each of two other datacenters in same Azure Region.

Redundancy options for managed disks

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-redundancy

On top of that you can choose the type of disk. Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD (traditional hard disk) are some the most common options, in order of performance. You may also choose Ultra Disk for special workloads where you need highest performance. Please see article below for types of managed disks:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-types

Most VM instance types also include a temporary disk which may be SSD or standard HDD for the temp drive. This disk is volatile so no data that you need to be persistent should be stored on it.

The above is basic overview of VM disks. There are more complicated options and use cases that I didn't touch on, but it should be enough for your use case as you described it.

If the above was useful please click Accept Answer.

Thanks.

-TP

Answer 2

Something here could help.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/managed-disks/

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--please don't forget to upvote and Accept as answer if the reply is helpful--

Answer 3

Hello everybody,

Sorry for the late response, thank you both for your input, this has helped me to get further into my task.

I've selected TP's post as accepted answer but with me being inexperienced in this topic both have been helpful.

Cheers!