Attach a data disk to a Windows VM with PowerShell

• 10/16/2018
• 3 minutes to read
• Contributors
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This article shows you how to attach both new and existing disks to a Windows virtual machine by using PowerShell.

First, review these tips:

• The size of the virtual machine controls how many data disks you can attach. For more information, see Sizes for virtual machines.
• To use premium SSDs, you'll need a premium storage-enabled VM type, like the DS-series or GS-series virtual machine.

Open Azure Cloud Shell

Azure Cloud Shell is an interactive shell environment hosted in Azure and used through your browser. Azure Cloud Shell allows you to use either bash or PowerShell shells to run a variety of tools to work with Azure services. Azure Cloud Shell comes pre-installed with the commands to allow you to run the content of this article without having to install anything on your local environment.

To run any code contained in this article on Azure Cloud Shell, open a Cloud Shell session, use the Copy button on a code block to copy the code, and paste it into the Cloud Shell session with Ctrl+Shift+V on Windows and Linux, or Cmd+Shift+V on macOS. Pasted text is not automatically executed, so press Enter to run code.

You can launch Azure Cloud Shell with:

Option	Example/Link
Select Try It in the upper-right corner of a code block. This doesn't automatically copy text to Cloud Shell.
Open Azure Cloud Shell in your browser.
Select the Cloud Shell button on the menu in the upper-right corner of the Azure portal.

Add an empty data disk to a virtual machine

This example shows how to add an empty data disk to an existing virtual machine.

Using managed disks

$rgName = 'myResourceGroup'
$vmName = 'myVM'
$location = 'East US' 
$storageType = 'Premium_LRS'
$dataDiskName = $vmName + '_datadisk1'

$diskConfig = New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName $storageType -Location $location -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128
$dataDisk1 = New-AzDisk -DiskName $dataDiskName -Disk $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName $rgName

$vm = Get-AzVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName 
$vm = Add-AzVMDataDisk -VM $vm -Name $dataDiskName -CreateOption Attach -ManagedDiskId $dataDisk1.Id -Lun 1

Update-AzVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName

Using managed disks in an Availability Zone

To create a disk in an Availability Zone, use New-AzDiskConfig with the -Zone parameter. The following example creates a disk in zone 1.

$rgName = 'myResourceGroup'
$vmName = 'myVM'
$location = 'East US 2'
$storageType = 'Premium_LRS'
$dataDiskName = $vmName + '_datadisk1'

$diskConfig = New-AzDiskConfig -SkuName $storageType -Location $location -CreateOption Empty -DiskSizeGB 128 -Zone 1
$dataDisk1 = New-AzDisk -DiskName $dataDiskName -Disk $diskConfig -ResourceGroupName $rgName

$vm = Get-AzVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName 
$vm = Add-AzVMDataDisk -VM $vm -Name $dataDiskName -CreateOption Attach -ManagedDiskId $dataDisk1.Id -Lun 1

Update-AzVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName

Initialize the disk

After you add an empty disk, you'll need to initialize it. To initialize the disk, you can sign in to a VM and use disk management. If you enabled WinRM and a certificate on the VM when you created it, you can use remote PowerShell to initialize the disk. You can also use a custom script extension:

    $location = "location-name"
    $scriptName = "script-name"
    $fileName = "script-file-name"
    Set-AzVMCustomScriptExtension -ResourceGroupName $rgName -Location $locName -VMName $vmName -Name $scriptName -TypeHandlerVersion "1.4" -StorageAccountName "mystore1" -StorageAccountKey "primary-key" -FileName $fileName -ContainerName "scripts"

The script file can contain code to initialize the disks, for example:

    $disks = Get-Disk | Where partitionstyle -eq 'raw' | sort number

    $letters = 70..89 | ForEach-Object { [char]$_ }
    $count = 0
    $labels = "data1","data2"

    foreach ($disk in $disks) {
        $driveLetter = $letters[$count].ToString()
        $disk | 
        Initialize-Disk -PartitionStyle MBR -PassThru |
        New-Partition -UseMaximumSize -DriveLetter $driveLetter |
        Format-Volume -FileSystem NTFS -NewFileSystemLabel $labels[$count] -Confirm:$false -Force
	$count++
    }

Attach an existing data disk to a VM

You can attach an existing managed disk to a VM as a data disk.

$rgName = "myResourceGroup"
$vmName = "myVM"
$location = "East US" 
$dataDiskName = "myDisk"
$disk = Get-AzDisk -ResourceGroupName $rgName -DiskName $dataDiskName 

$vm = Get-AzVM -Name $vmName -ResourceGroupName $rgName 

$vm = Add-AzVMDataDisk -CreateOption Attach -Lun 0 -VM $vm -ManagedDiskId $disk.Id

Update-AzVM -VM $vm -ResourceGroupName $rgName

Next steps

Create a snapshot.