Create Your First VM in Azure

Introduction

Cloud computing can be a complex term now a days, as there are already many services that can run on Cloud. Services like Data mining, Machine learning, creating virtual machines, host APIs for mobile applications and many other endless services.

Microsoft Azure is an open and varied platform, which allows you to choose from a variety of Operating Systems, programming languages. When you build an application in Azure, we will be using specific types of services that would be running on one or more servers on the cloud. We can configure and create Paas services like SQL databases, NoSQL databases, Document DB. Creating app services, and automating the Azure services using Powershell scripts is what triggers developers to use this. Here in this article, we will look into how to create a Virtual Machine and why to create a VM on Azure.

What is and Why Use Virtual Machine?

A virtual machine according to Wikipedia, is an emulation to computer system, where emulation would mean to enable a computer system to behave like another computer system (a job of an emulator which may be physical or virtual). A virtual machine can be used on Azure platform on OS like Windows and Linux. The VMs on Azure are highly efficient, high-scale, secure and run on a virtual environment on Windows server.

Creating a VM on Azure

Once, you are ready with the Azure subscription and up and running Azure portal, login to the Azure portal and you see the dashboard.
The dashboard on the portal displays all the services added to the Azure like below:

Click on the New (+) tab & you find another tabbed window displaying all the categories of services provided by Azure. The Virtual Machine is under the Compute service. The options would look like below:

The summary also shows about the sub services. Services like Windows Server Datacenter, which is effective, application focused and user friendly. Ubuntu Server 16.04 Transport Layer Security. SQL Server 2016 with SQL Server installed on the VM. A normal VM instance, a VM scale which can be used to deploy and also manage identical sets of VMs using a single image and many other compute services.

We would be creating here, a Windows Server Datacenter. Clicking on that option will ask the user to configure the Virtual Machine.

Once the configuration is added and OK is clicked, it asks the user for selecting the size of the VM. Remember, the pricing will vary based on the high end configured size (if chosen). Here, I am choosing the minimum configuration DS1_V2 Standard with 1 core. Based on the application, we can manipulate the configuration. That is the scaleable option provided by Microsoft Azure. We can anytime scale up and scale down based on our requirement.

Once done click Ok, then the tab for optional configuration. This is the 3^rd step. We can move on and click OK to finalize the purchase and get the VM. Once VM is ready, click on Connect and it downloads the RDP. Using the same username and password, we connect the VM and start using the VM.

It's up and running. We can go ahead and configure IIS and run on the server. You can manage your resources using the dashboard and stop the resource whenever not in use so as to avoid consumption of your credits.