Azure VM – Adding Temporary D Drive to a Migrated VM

azurehypervisorvirtual-machines

Any VM created in Azure is given a D drive; a temporary storage drive attached to the hypervisor; which gives better performance than the data disks as it's closer to the VM's compute resources. This comes at the cost of the contents not being persisted should the VM be deallocated / move to different host.

When you use Azure Migrate to move a VM from a non-Azure solution (e.g. an on-premise vmware solution) into Azure, no such temporary drive is created.

Is there a way to add such a drive to a migrated VM, so we can move the VM's pagefile there, and thus improve the performance of the migrated VM?

Best Answer

  • Per @SamCogan in the comments, check that the VM has a temporary drive.
  • Check whether the drive really is there; i.e. Get-ItemProperty 'HKCU:\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced' 'HideDrivesWithNoMedia' should return 0.
  • Optionally use PS to check: Get-PSDrive -PSProvider FileSystem | Format-Table Root, Description -AutoSize.
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