Step-By-Step: Creating a Virtual Machine in Azure

Azure Virtual Machines gives you the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions—development and testing, running applications, and extending your datacenter. It’s the freedom of open-source software configured the way you need it. It’s as if it was another rack in your datacenter, giving you the power to deploy an application in seconds instead of weeks.

Below are the steps to create an Azure virtual machine (VM) running Windows or Windows Server in the Azure portal. We’ll use a Windows Server image as an example, but that’s just one of the many images Azure offers.

Once you are logged into your Azure subscription at https://portal.azure.com, this section shows you how to use the Dashboard in the Azure portal to select and then create the virtual machine as per the steps below:

Step 1: click New > Compute > Windows Server 2016 Datacenter and start filling up the basic configuration settings for the Virtual Machines as:

Step 2: Next, click ‘OK’ and choose the VM sizing. The Size blade identifies the configuration details of the VM, and lists various choices that include OS, number of processors, disk storage type, and estimated monthly usage costs. To be economical, I am selecting a DS1 Standard size VM however the VM size largely depends on the purpose of the VM as:

Step 3: The next step is to configure optional features for the VM such as High Availability, Storage, Network, Extensions, Auto-shutdown option, Time Zone and Monitoring options. For ease, I am selecting default options that is already assigned by Azure as per the screenshot below:

Step 4: Once you click ‘OK’, the resource validation will take place and the screen will present the summary of the VM provisioning as per below.

Step 5: Click ‘Create’ so that the deployment of the VM starts immediately. This deployment will not take more than a couple of minutes.

Step 6: With this, the VM has just been created and ‘running’ and you are ready to go!

If you have any comments or feedbacks associated to this post, please let me know from the comment section so that everyone benefits from the discussions that we will have.

In the next blog post, I will be writing about how you can deploy an IIS Server in the VM running Windows Server. Stay tuned. Thank you for going thru this blog! See you soon!