Azure-VirtualMachines-Premium-SSD-Disabled

Severity : Medium

Description: This control ensures that Azure virtual machines are using Standard SSD disk volumes instead of Premium SSD volumes for cost-effective storage. Premium SSDs are high-performance Solid-State Drive (SSD) based Storage designed to support I/O intensive workloads with significantly high throughput and low latency. Most of workloads for web servers or enterprise applications needs consistent performance at lower IOPS. Only some mission critical application or performance sensitive workload needs higher through put at higher IOPS. Using Standard SSD volumes for Azure virtual machines efficient cut down VM storage costs while maintaining a good I/O performance.

Remediation Steps:

Perform following to configure retention period for recovery point :

1. Login to Azure Portal using https://portal.azure.com.

2. Navigate to All resources.

3. Filter the resources for Virtual Machine, select virtual machine.

4. From the list of VMs, select the reported VM.

5. If the VM is not stooped, select Stop and wait for VM to stopped.

6. Under Settings, select Disks to list the attached disk volumes.

7. Select Size + performance.

8. Change the Account Type, from Premium to Standard.

9. Select Save.

Important:

• The managed disks can switch from premium to standard. If the disks are unmanned it needs to convert first to managed disk.

Reference:

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/convert-disk-storage

• https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/convert-unmanaged-to-managed-disks