3 posts tagged with "Premium SSD"

Hello Friends,

Welcome to the final part of this series. In Part 1 we covered why Premium SSD creates the oversizing problem in the first place, how the pricing model for Premium SSD v2 actually works, and how to identify which disks in your environment are worth migrating. In Part 2 we went through the snapshot-based migration itself, built a PowerShell script that handles the full workflow with a WhatIf mode, and looked at a Bicep pattern for new deployments with zone alignment done correctly from the start.

Now that the disks are running on Premium SSD v2, there is one more thing I want to address, because this is where I see most teams leave money on the table. When you create a Premium SSD v2 disk, you have to decide on IOPS and throughput values at that moment. Most people base that decision on what the old Premium SSD tier was delivering, which was itself a number that came from disk size, not from any measurement of what the workload actually needed. So you migrate, and you carry the same inflated numbers across to the new SKU.

In this part we will look at how to use real utilization data to right-size those values, how to write KQL queries that show you what the disk is actually doing, and how to set up Azure Monitor alerts that surface problems before they affect anything.

Hello Friends,

Welcome back to Part 2. In Part 1 we covered why Premium SSD creates the oversizing problem, how Premium SSD v2 changes the pricing model, the constraints that shape migration planning, and a PowerShell script to identify candidate disks across a subscription. If you have not read that yet, start there because the zone requirement in particular will come up again here.

In this part we go through the actual migration. The good news is that the process is more direct than most people expect: you deallocate the VM, update the disk SKU in place, and restart. There is no new disk to create, no data to copy, and no disk swap. The existing disk is converted to Premium SSD v2 with the same name and resource ID it always had.

Hello Friends,

One of the projects I was recently involved in brought something to my mind that I have been wanting to write about for a while. The team had a solid Azure footprint, a mature DevOps practice, and a FinOps initiative that was starting to ask the right questions about where the money was actually going. When we pulled the disk inventory, the answer was staring back at us: disk after disk on Premium SSD, sized at 2,048 GiB to reach 7,500 IOPS, running workloads that were using 300 GiB of actual storage. The performance need was driving the disk size, not the other way around, and the team had no idea because that is just how Premium SSD works.

This is exactly the kind of spend that FinOps conversations surface once you get past the shiny dashboards and start looking at the actual resource configuration. You are not paying for something wasteful, you are paying for the model. The billing is working exactly as designed. The problem is the design itself, and Premium SSD v2 changes it entirely. Storage, IOPS, and throughput become three independent dimensions you configure and pay for separately. If you only need 300 GiB and 4,000 IOPS, that is precisely what you provision and precisely what you pay for.

In this three-part series I want to walk through the full picture: why the old model creates this pattern, how to identify which disks in your environment are worth migrating, how the migration itself works, and what to do after migration to keep the economics working in your favour. In Part 2 we go through the direct in-place conversion with PowerShell and Bicep. In Part 3 we cover right-sizing, monitoring, and cost governance after migration.