How to identify Ephemeral VMs in Azure

Question

How to identify Ephemeral VMs in Azure ? Like VMs used in ScaleSets or DataBricks or K8S pods, i want to run a set of queries on VMs but exclude these ephemeral VMs. I know about Ephemeral OS disks, are all ephemeral VMs expected to use them ?

My end goal is to create Resource graph queries like , all VMs with non-company-standard disks , All VMs with vulnerabilities etc. I don't want the results to include VMs created in a scale set, or in other managed environments like databricks

Answer 1

Hello @Pookat, Sanal (MBHC 21) ,
Thanks for reaching out to Microsoft Q&A.
To identify Ephemeral vs Non-Ephemeral VMs you can use the attribute called "Ephemeral Os disk".

If the VM is ephemeral : Ephemeral OS Disk attribute value will be "OS Cache"
If the VM is non-ephemeral: Ephemeral OS Disk attribute value will be "N/A"

Ephemeral VM:

Non-Ephemeral VM:

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Using Azure PowerShell how to differentiate Ephemeral vs Non-Ephemeral
For Ephemeral:
(Get-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName ephemeraldemo -Name ephemeralvm).StorageProfile.OsDisk.Caching
Output: ReadOnly
For Non-Ephemeral
(Get-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName ephemeralnondemo -Name ephemeralnondemo).StorageProfile.OsDisk.Caching
Output: ReadWrite
For Ephemeral
(Get-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName ephemeraldemo -Name ephemeralvm).StorageProfile.OsDisk.DiffDiskSettings
Output: Local
For Non-Ephemeral
(Get-AzureRmVM -ResourceGroupName ephemeralnondemo -Name ephemeralnondemo ).StorageProfile.OsDisk.DiffDiskSettings
Output: N/A

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Additional details:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/ephemeral-os-disks

Kindly let us know if you have additional queries.