Temporary D drive is almost full in VM

Question

I don't want to mess with that drive. For us it's like it doesn't exist because this drive comes with the VM installation and is a temporary drive managed by Azure. We never messed with that drive. I just find it weird that it's almost full. Do I need to worry?

Answer 1

Hello @Hugo Gonçalves ,
Thanks for responding.
You do not need to worry about the temporary drive D if you have not stored any data there that you want to be persistent in nature. Temporary drive is non persistent. I would advise you to cross-check once to make sure temprary drive D only consists data that you do not require permanently.
Please read the below information once to get more clarity on this. Thanks.

Virtual machines contain one temporary disk on each VM. The data on these temporary disks may not remain through standard VM lifecycle events. This is because the data for the temporary disks is stored on the host operating system running the hypervisor software while the data for persistent disks is stored in Microsoft Azure Storage. The temporary disk is very useful for data which, you guessed it, is temporary in nature. A great example of this type of data for Windows is the pagefile. In fact, when a new Windows VM is provisioned from an image in Azure we configure the pagefile to be located on this temporary disk. Customers should not use the temporary disk for data that should be persistent. A common misconfiguration that we have seen is customers placing a SQL database file on the temporary drive or placing the database files for a Windows Active Directory Domain Controller on this drive. For most Windows VMs the volume on the temporary disk will have the drive letter of D:. It will also have the drive label of “Temporary Storage”. This can be seen in the screenshot below from an Azure virtual machine. To ensure that you are not incorrectly using the temporary disk, we recommend that you take an action that will cause the temporary disk to be reset as part of your testing procedures.
The simplest method to cause the temporary disk to be reset is to change the size of the virtual machine. You should first configure the virtual machine as required, change the VM size and then return to the VM to ensure that everything is functioning as expected.

I hope this helps? Do let me know if you have any questions by tagging me in your response. Thanks.

--------
If you find the above information helpful, please select on "Accept as Answer" to increase the relevancy of this post.