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Azure Storage Transactions in VM's?

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 2:14 PM

Hi,

I am trying to understand "Storage transactions" - lets say I have a "Standard_A4_v2" VM running (127 GiB - Standard HDD),

If I have the machine turned on and sitting idle - and I don't have any extra processes running just windows sitting idle.

Ok so windows will run and various logs are written to disk various internal logs and event logs etc on the OS disk.

So this poses some questions:

  1. Am I still charged "Storage Transactions" for this or is it only if I have a process accessing data from another storage account external to this VM?

  2. Secondly does it also count for a read data in this synario.

  3. If I write some powershell that loops around and reads event logs for example - would I be generating more storage transactions?

  4. Is there a metric (or something else on a VM) that I can look at to see how many are being generated?

  5. Plus is there a good URL that I can read further about it?

Thanks,

Ward.

All replies (4)

Wednesday, May 1, 2019 4:07 PM | 1 vote

Hi, 

I will try to answer your queries as simple as I can:

1. Am I still charged "Storage Transactions" for this or is it only if I have a process accessing data from another storage account external to this VM?

There are two statuses for the VMs "Stopped" and "Stopped(Deallocated)". When is "Stopped" you also charged for the disk capacity and the VM resources, if the status is "Stopped(Deallocated)" you don't charge for the VM resources. 

2. Secondly does it also count for a read data in this synario.

Check this link for details about disk monitoring.

3. If I write some powershell that loops around and reads event logs for example - would I be generating more storage transactions?

A good example to understand storage transactions is the follow example:

The default block size is 4MB which means if you upload a file with 184 MB occurred 46 transactions. 

In this link, you can find a good article for the Storage Transactions calculation.

4. Is there a metric (or something else on a VM) that I can look at to see how many are being generated?

The azure portal gives you the ability to run some tests to see exactly the number of the transaction for the workloads, you check the image below:

5. Plus is there a good URL that I can read further about it?

p.s If I didn't understand any query please elaborate with more details.

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Wednesday, May 1, 2019 7:31 PM

Hi,

I'm confused by this - are you running unmanaged disks on the VM?  Ideally you would upgrade this to managed to take management away and let MS take care of the work.

If you use managed disks then you don't get charged for transactions on the disk - you just pay for the cost of the disk. With managed disks, you do pay for the full disk space rather than just what you use (unmanaged disks work on pay for what you use rather than what is allocated) but these are what you want to be using.

If you have Standard HDD disks then that sounds managed and you dont need to worry about storage transactions?

Have I misunderstood?

Thanks,

Matt

Friday, May 17, 2019 8:13 PM

Any update on this issue? 

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Friday, May 31, 2019 7:01 PM

Any update on this thread?

If a answer was useful, please remember to upvote and "Mark as answer" so others in the community can easily find it.