Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Temporary Storage in WIndows Azure VMs

If you have ever set up a virtual machine in Windows Azure, you may notice that by default, you end up with a D:\ drive on each of the VMs that is labeled "Temporary Storage".  In addition, the root of the D:\ drive comes with a file that indicates that there is a potential of Data Loss when storing files on the D:\ drive.

So why exactly is the D:\ drive considered "Temporary Storage"?  As far as I could tell, the D:\ drive was never wiped out through numerous reboots, re-starts etc.

Well, I decided to try and change the configuration of one of my Azure VMs to increase the amount of memory currently allocated on the VM and that is when I discovered the true meaning of "Temporary Storage"!



As it turns out, the D:\ drive is completely wiped out when you make a configuration change to a VM!  Therefore, everything that was on your D:\ drive is removed/deleted.

Of course, in my case, I only had been storing software installation files for configuring my VM, so the D:\ drive really was "Temporary Storage" for me anyway, but at least now you know what the D:\ drive is being used for in your Windows Azure VMs!!

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