Performance tiers for managed disks
The performance of your Azure managed disk is set when you create your disk, in the form of its performance tier. The performance tier determines the IOPS and throughput your managed disk has. When you set the provisioned size of your disk, a performance tier is automatically selected. The performance tier can be changed at deployment or afterwards, without changing the size of the disk.
Changing the performance tier allows you to prepare for and meet higher demand without using your disk's bursting capability. It can be more cost-effective to change your performance tier rather than rely on bursting, depending on how long the additional performance is necessary. This is ideal for events that temporarily require a consistently higher level of performance, like holiday shopping, performance testing, or running a training environment. To handle these events, you can use a higher performance tier for as long as you need it. You can then return to the original tier when you no longer need the additional performance.
How it works
When you first deploy or provision a disk, the baseline performance tier for that disk is set based on the provisioned disk size. You can use a performance tier higher than the original baseline to meet higher demand. When you no longer need that performance level, you can return to the initial baseline performance tier.
Your billing changes as your performance tier changes. For example, if you provision a P10 disk (128 GiB), your baseline performance tier is set as P10 (500 IOPS and 100 MBps). You'll be billed at the P10 rate. You can upgrade the tier to match the performance of P50 (7,500 IOPS and 250 MBps) without increasing the disk size. During the time of the upgrade, you'll be billed at the P50 rate. When you no longer need the higher performance, you can return to the P10 tier. The disk will once again be billed at the P10 rate.
| Disk size | Baseline performance tier | Can be upgraded to |
|---|---|---|
| 4 GiB | P1 | P2, P3, P4, P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 8 GiB | P2 | P3, P4, P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 16 GiB | P3 | P4, P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 32 GiB | P4 | P6, P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 64 GiB | P6 | P10, P15, P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 128 GiB | P10 | P15, P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 256 GiB | P15 | P20, P30, P40, P50 |
| 512 GiB | P20 | P30, P40, P50 |
| 1 TiB | P30 | P40, P50 |
| 2 TiB | P40 | P50 |
| 4 TiB | P50 | None |
| 8 TiB | P60 | P70, P80 |
| 16 TiB | P70 | P80 |
| 32 TiB | P80 | None |
For billing information, see Managed disk pricing.
Restrictions
- This feature is currently supported only for premium SSDs.
- You must either deallocate your VM or detach your disk from a running VM before you can change the disk's tier.
- The P60, P70, and P80 performance tiers can only be used by disks that are larger than 4,096 GiB.
- A disk's performance tier can be downgraded only once every 12 hours.
Change performance tier without downtime (preview)
Normally, you would have to deallocate your VM or detach your disk to change your performance tier. But if you enable this preview feature you don't have to deallocate your VM or detach your disk to change the tier. You can sign up for the preview here.
The preview has the following limitations:
- Available in EastUS2EUAP region only.
- Not currently available for shared disks
- Must use Azure Resource Manager templates with the
2020-12-01API to change performance tiers without downtime.
Next steps
To learn how to change your performance tier, see portal or PowerShell/CLI articles.