Creating and configuring Azure VMs

Creating an Azure VM is a very straightforward process – all you have to do is follow the given steps:

  1. Navigate to the Azure portal and search for Virtual Machines, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.1: Searching for Virtual Machines
  1. Once the VM blade is opened, you can click on +Add to create a new VM, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.2: Virtual Machines blade
  1. Once you have clicked on +Add, a new blade will pop up where you have to search for and select the desired OS for the VM, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.3: Searching for Windows Server 2016 OS for the VM
  1. Once the OS is selected, you need to select the deployment model, whether that be Resource Manager or Classic, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.4: Selecting the deployment model
  1. Once the deployment model is selected, a new blade will pop up where you have to specify the following:
    • Name: Specify the name of the VM.
    • VM disk type: Specify whether the disk type will be SSD or HDD. Consider that SSD will offer consistent, low-latency performance, but will incur more charges. Note that this option is not available for the Classic model in this blade, but is available in the Configure optional features blade.
    • User name: Specify the username that will be used to log on the VM.
    • Password: Specify the password, which must be between 12 and 123 characters long and must contain three of the following: one lowercase character, one uppercase character, one number, and one special character that is not or -.
    • Subscription: This specifies the subscription that will be charged for the VM usage.
    • Resource group: This specifies the resource group within which the VM will exist.
    • Location: Specify the location in which the VM will be created. It is recommended that you select the nearest location to you.
    • Save money: Here, you specify whether you own Windows Server Licenses with active Software Assurance (SA). If you do, Azure Hybrid Benefit is recommended to save compute costs.

For more information about Azure Hybrid Benefit, you can check out the following page: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/windows/hybrid-use-benefit-licensing.

Figure 3.5: Configure the VM basic settings
  1. Once you have clicked on OK, a new blade will pop up where you have to specify the VM size so that the VMs series can select the one that will fulfil your needs, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.6: Select the VM size
  1. Once the VM size has been specified, you need to specify the following settings:
    • Availability set: This option provides High availability for the VM by setting the VMs within the same application and availability set. Here, the VMs will be in different fault and update domains (which has been discussed in the table in Chapter 1, Azure Virtual Networks 101), granting the VMs high availability (up to 99.95% of Azure SLA).
    • Use managed disks: Enable this feature to have Azure automatically manage the availability of disks to provide data redundancy and fault tolerance without creating and managing storage accounts on your own. This setting is not available in the Classic model.
    • Virtual network: Specify the virtual network to which you want to assign the VM.
    • Subnet: Select the subnet within the virtual network that you specified earlier to assign the VM to.
    • Public IP address: Either select an existing public IP address or create a new one.
    • Network security group (firewall): Select the NSG you want to assign to the VM NIC. This is called endpoints in the Classic model.
    • Extensions: You can add more features to the VM using extensions, such as configuration management, antivirus protection, and so on.
    • Auto-shutdown: Specify whether you want to shut down your VM daily or not; if you do, you can set a schedule. Considering that this option will help you saving compute cost especially for dev and test scenarios. This is not available in the Classic model.
    • Notification before shutdown: Check this if you enabled Auto-shutdown and want to subscribe for notifications before the VM shuts down. This is not available in the Classic model.
    • Boot diagnostics: This captures serial console output and screenshots of the VM running on a host to help diagnose start up issues.
    • Guest OS diagnostics: This obtains metrics for the VM every minute; you can use these metrics to create alerts and stay informed of your applications.
    • Diagnostics storage account: This is where metrics are written, so you can analyze them with your own tools.
Figure 3.7: Specify more settings for the VM
Enabling Boot diagnostics and Guest diagnostics will incur more charges, since the diagnostics will need a dedicated storage account to store their data.
  1. Finally, once you are done with its settings, Azure will validate those you have specified and summarize them, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.8: VM Settings Summary
  1. Once clicked on, Create the VM will start the creation process, and within minutes the VM will be created.
  1. Once the VM is created, you can navigate to the Virtual Machines blade to open the VM that has been created, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.9: The created VM overview
  1. To connect to the VM, click on Connect, where a pre-configured RDP file with the required VM information will be downloaded.
  2. Open the RDP file. You will be asked to enter the username and password you specified for the VM during its configuration, as shown in the following screenshot:
Figure 3.10: Entering the VM credentials
  1. Voila! You should now be connected to the VM.
..................Content has been hidden....................

You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.
Reset