How to identify boot, temp and data disks in Azure Linux VMs

Kay Singh
1 min readApr 30, 2019

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In Azure, every VM has a persistent OS Disk that is used for booting the VM and contains the operating system. In addition to an OS disk, each VM also has a temporary disk that is present on the compute cluster hosting your VM.

Why is my OS disk not @ /dev/sda?

In most cases the OS disk is /dev/sda but in some odd cases it is not. This is not an Azure specific issue but a default Linux behavior. The ordering in which Linux enumerates SCSI devices is nondeterministic. It scans SCSI devices in the order they appear on the PCI Bus. Therefore, whichever disk is enumerated first is /dev/sda.

OK, so how to identify my disks?

Read the rest of the article on my blog @ https://www.singhkays.com/blog/how-to-identify-azure-linux-vm-disks/

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Kay Singh

PM @ Azure Compute buidling Managed Disks and Shared Image Gallery - All opinions and blogs my own and in no way official documentation.