Missing Performance Plus on Eligible Managed Disks

Many environments that previously required custom performance settings continue to pay for additional throughput unnecessarily. By not enabling Performance Plus on eligible disks, organizations miss a straightforward opportunity to reduce disk spend while maintaining or improving performance. The feature is opt-in and can only be enabled when a disk is created, so existing disks must be recreated from a snapshot to benefit.

Azure Managed Disks are billed based on:

• Provisioned disk size (GB/month)
• Disk type (e.g., Premium SSD, Standard SSD, Ultra)
• Additional performance settings, if configured manually

Performance Plus allows eligible disks to receive enhanced performance without incurring additional costs, potentially replacing paid performance upgrades.

• Identify disks >= 513 GiB that have manually configured additional IOPS or throughput
• Check for disks operating near IOPS or MBps limits that are eligible for Performance Plus
• Review whether Performance Plus has been enabled on qualifying Premium SSD, Standard SSD, or Standard HDD disks (disks recovered with Azure Site Recovery are not supported)
• Cross-reference against workloads with high sustained disk usage to prioritize impact

• Performance Plus can only be set when a disk is created. For existing eligible disks, create a snapshot, create a new disk from it with Performance Plus enabled (same region, 513 GiB or larger), and swap it onto the VM during a maintenance window
• Decommission paid performance tiers or custom throughput settings where Performance Plus provides equivalent capability
• Incorporate Performance Plus enablement into provisioning templates for large disks going forward, creating those disks separately because it cannot be enabled on disks created during VM creation

Enable Performance Plus on Azure Disks