Preview - Increase IOPS and throughput limits for Azure Premium SSDs and Standard SSD/HDDs

  • Article

The Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) and throughput limits for Azure Premium solid-state drives (SSD), Standard SSDs, and Standard hard disk drives (HDD) that are 513 GiB and larger can be increased by enabling performance plus. Enabling performance plus (preview) improves the experience for workloads that require high IOPS and throughput, such as database and transactional workloads. There's no extra charge for enabling performance plus on a disk.

Once enabled, the IOPS and throughput limits for an eligible disk increase to the higher maximum limits. To see the new IOPS and throughput limits for eligible disks, consult the columns that begin with "*Expanded" in the Scalability and performance targets for VM disks article.

Limitations

  • Can only be enabled on Standard HDD, Standard SSD, and Premium SSD managed disks that are 513 GiB or larger.
  • Can only be enabled on new disks.
    • To work around this, create a snapshot of your disk, then create a new disk from the snapshot.
  • Not supported for disks recovered with Azure Site Recovery or Azure Backup.
  • Can't be enabled in the Azure portal.

Prerequisites

Either install a version of the Azure PowerShell module 9.5 or newer, or a version of the Azure CLI that is 2.44.0 or newer.

Enable performance plus

You need to create a new disk to use performance plus. The following script creates a disk that has performance plus enabled and attach it to a VM:

myRG=yourResourceGroupName
myDisk=yourDiskName
myVM=yourVMName
region=desiredRegion
# Valid values are Premium_LRS, Premium_ZRS, StandardSSD_LRS, StandardSSD_ZRS, or Standard_LRS
sku=desiredSKU
#Size must be 513 or larger
size=513
az disk create -g $myRG -n $myDisk --size-gb $size --sku $sku -l $region --performance-plus true 

az vm disk attach --vm-name $myVM --name $myDisk --resource-group $myRG

To migrate data from an existing disk or snapshot to a new disk with performance plus enabled, use the following script:

myRG=yourResourceGroupName
myDisk=yourDiskName
myVM=yourVMName
region=desiredRegion
# Valid values are Premium_LRS, Premium_ZRS, StandardSSD_LRS, StandardSSD_ZRS, or Standard_LRS
sku=desiredSKU
#Size must be 513 or larger
size=513
sourceURI=yourDiskOrSnapshotURI

az disk create --name $myDisk --resource-group $myRG --size-gb $size -- --performance-plus true --sku $sku --source $sourceURI --location $region

Next steps