Azure How To Check If Disk Is Managed Or Unmanaged

Understanding whether a disk is managed or unmanaged is essential for managing your Azure resources. This article will discuss the quick approaches to determine if the disk is managed or unmanaged in your Azure VM.

How to tell if disk is managed or unmanaged Azure

Let us dive deep into the two simple approaches to doing this.

• Approach-1: Using Azure Portal
• Approach-2: Using Azure CLI

Approach-1: Using Azure Portal

Follow the below steps

1. Log in to Azure Portal.

2. Search for Virtual Machines and click on the search result Virtual Machines.

3. Click on the Azure Virtual Machines from the list.

4. Click on the Disks link from the left navigation and then click on the attached OS disk name, as shown in the screenshot below.

If you closely look at the URL

For managed disks, the URL will look like below

/resource/subscriptions/1cdf4300-dee5-4518-9c9c-feaa72a5cbd1/resourceGroups/NEWRESGROUP/providers/Microsoft.Compute/disks/AzureLessonsVM_disk1_716204ec2c5a443c8628df74370ac9fd

So, in my case, it is a managed disk, as shown in the screenshot below.

For unmanaged disks, the URL will look like below

/storage_account_name.blob.core.windows.net/yourVM_name/yourVM_name.vhd

Approach-2: Using Azure CLI

You can use the below Azure CLI command to identify if the disk is managed or unmanaged.

az vm show -g your resource group name -n your Virtual Machine name

Example

az vm show -g NEWRESGROUP -n AzureLessonsVM

After executing the above command, I got the expected output as below.

If you look closely at the OSDisk section, the “vhd” is null, which means that it is a managed disk.

"osDisk": {
      "caching": "ReadWrite",
      "createOption": "FromImage",
      "deleteOption": null,
      "diffDiskSettings": null,
      "diskSizeGb": null,
      "encryptionSettings": null,
      "image": null,
      "managedDisk": {
        "diskEncryptionSet": null,
        "id": "/subscriptions/1cdf4300-dee5-4518-9c9c-feaa72a5cbd1/resourceGroups/NEWRESGROUP/providers/Microsoft.Compute/disks/AzureLessonsVM_disk1_716
204ec2c5a443c8628df74370ac9fd",
        "resourceGroup": "NEWRESGROUP",
        "securityProfile": null,
        "storageAccountType": null
      },
      "name": "AzureLessonsVM_disk1_716204ec2c5a443c8628df74370ac9fd",
      "osType": "Windows",
      "vhd": null,
      "writeAcceleratorEnabled": false
    }
  },

You may also like following the articles below

• How to swap os disk in Azure VM
• How to enable Azure disk encryption

Rajkishore

I am Rajkishore, and I am a Microsoft Certified IT Consultant. I have over 14 years of experience in Microsoft Azure and AWS, with good experience in Azure Functions, Storage, Virtual Machines, Logic Apps, PowerShell Commands, CLI Commands, Machine Learning, AI, Azure Cognitive Services, DevOps, etc. Not only that, I do have good real-time experience in designing and developing cloud-native data integrations on Azure or AWS, etc. I hope you will learn from these practical Azure tutorials. Read more.