Azure VM: Single disk (filesystem) greater than 1023 GB?

Question

I'm using Azure Virtual Machines, specifically Linux. I went to add a blank disk ("attach...blank disk" in the portal) and discovered that Azure only allows a maximum size of 1023GB for disks. The portal won't allow you to specify a size beyond 1023GB.

What I'm looking for is a 4TB filesystem. The disks present themselves as /dev/xd?. I'm wondering if I could take four 1TB disks and stripe them (RAID 0) in the OS? If they're SAN disks then I'm not concerned about the redundancy since presumably they're already protected. I admit it sounds kind of hokey.

Is there another option to get bigger disks in Azure?

To be clear, I want persistent storage, not the ephemeral /mnt/storage.

Answer 1

You are correct. You need 4 disks in Raid0 to get 4TB of data. You can follow the guide below; just make sure to change parameters accordingly because the guide uses 3 disks only.

Configure Software RAID on Linux

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/virtual-machines-linux-configure-raid/

Regarding redundancy, no matter what kind of storage you configured in Azure, the worst you can get is 3 mirrors for each disk so just go for full performance.

Azure Storage Replication

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/storage-redundancy/

Answer 2

For Windows you may use Storage Spaces

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dfurman/archive/2014/04/27/using-storage-spaces-on-an-azure-vm-cluster-for-sql-server-storage.aspx

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831739.aspx