by Ali Zaman

Although there are many ways to upload an image file to Azure (including GUI based tools) but I think Powershell is still the best and the most efficient option.

Why? because of the following reasons:

1. Add-AzureVHD commandlet automatically converts a VHDX file to VHD during upload. This is useful since Windows Azure only supports VHD for now.
2. Add-AzureVHD is “aware” of the VHD format and so copies only the bytes that contain data and skips the empty ones. This saves a lot of time – it took 10 minutes to upload a file with Add-AzureVHD vs. 80 minutes for the same file with another GUI based tool.
3. Add-Azure also uses a checksum to verify the integrity of the uploaded file.

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