Move from standard to premium when moving from unmanaged to managed

Q. When switching from unmanaged to managed disks can I move from Standard to Premium?

A. Managed disks remove the need to worry about storage accounts and their associated limits, instead making a disk a first-class Azure resource. It is simple to convert an unmanaged disk to a managed disk through the ConvertTo-AzureRmVMManagedDisk cmdlet. You can only switch to the same type, i.e. Standard unmanaged to Standard managed. If you wanted to move from Standard unmanaged to Premium managed you would need to perform the following:

1. Ensure the VM was of a type that supports Premium, i.e. <something>S (e.g. DS, FS, GS etc)
2. Shutdown the VM
3. Convert the VM to use managed disks via the ConvertTo-AzureRmVMManagedDisk cmdlet
4. Once the VM has started switch the managed disk from Standard to Premium through the properties of the disk
5. Reboot the VM