Plan storage for Azure Virtual Desktop user data
Azure offers multiple storage solutions that you can use to store your FSLogix profile container. This unit compares storage solutions that Azure offers for Azure Virtual Desktop FSLogix user profile containers. We recommend storing FSLogix profile containers on Azure Files for most of our customers.
Azure Virtual Desktop offers FSLogix profile containers as the recommended user profile solution. FSLogix is designed to roam profiles in remote computing environments, such as Azure Virtual Desktop. At sign-in, this container is dynamically attached to the computing environment using a natively supported Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) and a Hyper-V Virtual Hard Disk (VHDX). The user profile is immediately available and appears in the system exactly like a native user profile.
| Features | Azure Files | Azure NetApp Files | Storage Spaces Direct |
|---|---|---|---|
| Use case | General purpose | General purpose to enterprise scale | Cross-platform |
| Platform service | Yes, Azure-native solution | Yes, Azure-native solution | No, self-managed |
| Regional availability | All regions | Select regions | All regions |
| Redundancy | Locally redundant/zone-redundant/geo-redundant/geo-zone-redundant | Locally redundant/zone-redundant with cross-zone replication/geo-redundant with cross-region replication | Locally redundant/zone-redundant/geo-redundant |
| Tiers and performance | Standard (Transaction optimized) Premium Up to max 100K IOPS per share with 10 GBps per share at about 3-ms latency |
Standard Premium Ultra Up to max 460K IOPS per volume with 4.5 GBps per volume at about 1 ms latency. For IOPS and performance details, see Azure NetApp Files performance considerations and the FAQ. |
Standard HDD: up to 500 IOPS per-disk limits Standard SSD: up to 4k IOPS per-disk limits Premium SSD: up to 20k IOPS per-disk limits We recommend Premium disks for Storage Spaces Direct |
| Capacity | 100 TiB per share, Up to 5 PiB per general purpose account | 100 TiB per volume, up to 12.5 PiB per NetApp account | Maximum 32 TiB per disk |
| Required infrastructure | Minimum share size 1 GiB | Minimum capacity pool 2 TiB, min volume size 100 GiB | Two VMs on Azure IaaS (+ Cloud Witness) or at least three VMs without and costs for disks |
| Protocols | SMB 3.0/2.1, NFSv4.1 (preview), REST | NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB 3.x/2.x, dual-protocol | NFSv3, NFSv4.1, SMB 3.1 |