Well, this was a painful experience. I googled until my fingers were sore, and even when I thought I got the right solution, it didn’t quite work for me. Anyway, here’s what I wanted to do:

I had a storage account in West Europe, but some bright spark decided to create our virtual network in North Europe, so I had to move one of my disk images (a 127GB Windows 2008 image) from West to North. 

The first thing I needed to do was create a new Storage Account (I called it DiskImages) in the correct target location, namely North Europe.

The next thing I did was make the container in my source Storage Account public, otherwise the command I was going to run would fail. I made this change via the UI (go to your source storage account, then select the relevant container and click edit). I didn’t have to do this for the target Storage Account though, and I’m way too weary to work out why (probably because you end up passing the Access Key in the command later).

Oh I nearly forgot, I needed to install and configure the Azure Cross-Platform CLI (you can find details here), because having only one command line interface (Azure Powershell) with your Azure subscription just isn’t enough!

The last thing I needed was to copy my Access Key for my target Storage Account (just go to the storage account and click on “Manage Access Keys” at the bottom).

Then I ran this command:

azure vm disk upload https://SOURCE_STORAGE_ACCOUNT_URL.blob.core.windows.net/vhds/win2k8-win2k8-2014-05-15.vhd https://DiskImages.blob.core.windows.net/vhds/win2k8-win2k8-2014-05-15.vhd gv5hQZGJuOPFJWsSuFFiCiEnTLYgooFFEdArouNDWITH4nptTg==

And it worked!

So, basically that’s just “azure vm disk upload [SOURCE] [TARGET] [TARGET_ACCESS_KEY]”

That’s when I realised that I was copying a 127GB image from 1 datacentre to another and that:

a) It would take about 4 hours

b) It would cost money

And that’s when I stopped it, and just made a new template image in the correct location. You live and learn.