Azure Storage types for Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD)
Azure Storage offers cloud storage solution by Microsoft and is available for Windows Virtual Desktop (hosted desktop as a service) solution. It is scalable, durable, limitless and optimized for storing structured and unstructured (text and multimedia) data; available in the pay-as-you-go model. The useful features make Azure Windows Virtual Desktop (WVD ) storage very suitable for your business; irrespective of whether you need only a few hundred GBs or trillions, you can scale up/down as per your need using Windows or Linux OS. Here’s a brief on the Azure WVD storage system.
Types of Storage
Broadly coming under two types Azure storage account comes under i) Standard Storage and ii) Premium Storage.
A) Standard Storage- offers 4 versions of storage a) Blob b) Table c) Queue and d) File storage
B) Premium Storage- offers Azure Virtual Machine (VM) disks.
A) Standard Storage
a) Blob Storage
Azure Blob storage typically comes in three different types – a) Block b) Append and c) Page blobs. You can store data like videos, music files, image files, message, log and metadata and your backups. You must specify your blob type while creating a blob. Because once created, its type will remain fixed. You can only update the blob following the available options unique to that blob type.
i) Block blobs are used for document, image, video files and allows insertion, replacement and deletion of blocks.Blob storage can contain up to 50,000 blocks. Each blob gets identified by its ID and can be of different sizes of reaching a maximum of 100MB.
ii) Append blobs are blocks that are optimized for appends i.e. if you modify blocks will be added at the end of your Append blob. Very useful for situations that require adding data to the existing blob without modifying the existing ones. You cannot update or delete the existing blocks and neither these have block IDs. Each block can be of a maximum of 4MB and an append blob can have up to 50,000 blocks.
iii) Page blobs (collection of 512-byte pages hence the name)are optimized for random read/write operations. You need to specify your page blob size with a maximum size of 8TB.
b) Table Storage
Azure storage table allows you to store enormous structured data. It uses NoSQL database and is extremely suitable for storing non-relational, structured data with on-demand scalability.
c) Queue Storage
Allows you to store substantial messages that you can access from across the globe via calls using HyperText Transfer Protocol (or HTTP- that allows online communication and data transfer from one machine to another. A message can be up to 64 KB and queue storage can include millions of messages within the limit of a storage account.
d) File Storage
Azure file storage offers you fully managed file sharing in the cloud using the Server Message Block 3.0 (SMB) protocol. You can move your applications including on-premise apps to the cloud from anywhere in the world, integrate the latest apps with the existing ones.
B) Premium Storage
The difference between the Standard and Premium storage is that the latter uses the latest Solid-State Drive (SSD) for the Azure VMs whereas the former stores data on Hard Disk Drives (HDD).
Premium Storage brings consistent high input-output performance with low latency and useful for Online Transactional Processing, Big Data and Data Warehousing workloads.
At present this storage is available for Page Blobs and Data Disks on VMs.
Features like scalability, security, reliability and easy accessibility (using latest technology like HTTP) make Azure Storage popular.
No hassle for data backup and maintenance or security as these are taken care of by Microsoft Azure. Through replication process, Azure maintains different data copies at various geo-locations so that your data remains safe against any natural disaster.
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