In this lesson, I will show you how to create a virtual machine in the Azure portal. We'll talk about what locations would be appropriate for creating a virtual machine. We'll review the hardware plan and operating system choices that you have when creating a virtual machine, and that has an impact on virtual machine pricing, so we'll take a look at the costs associated with running a virtual machine. We'll also cover the basics of virtual machine management, including startup and shutdown, and finally, learn how to access a virtual machine using the appropriate remote control software. A virtual machine is one of the most common resources to be created in an Azure subscription. A virtual machine is essentially a computer. The computer will exist up in the Azure data center, and this allows us to then place computers anywhere in the world that we can use for appropriate development purposes. You can see here in the Azure portal, Virtual Machines is presented to me as one of the commonly used tiles at the top of the screen. If you don't see Virtual Machines, you can find them by typing in virtual machines up in the menu search box up at the top of the screen, or click the hamburger menu on the left hand side of the screen, and you'll see there's a Virtual Machines menu option here as well. These all take you to the same place, the ability for you to view all of the virtual machines or remote computers that you have built as part of your Azure subscription. And you can see here we don't have any virtual machines yet, so let's create one. You can see here if we click the Create button, we're prompted to create an Azure virtual machine. This takes us to the screen where we are provided with an opportunity to enter in the basic information for our VM. The first thing that we have to enter in is what resource group we would like to place this in. We covered resource groups in a previous module, and this would allow me to categorize or organize the resources in my portal so that I can keep resources together that might be used by the same department or the same project. We have a resource group called Demo, so I'm gonna put this virtual machine in this existing resource group. I now must enter in the appropriate virtual machine. We'll keep this short, make sure that this provides some descriptive information for the virtual machine, usually some sort of numerical identifier. The reason that we add numbers at the end of our machines is because it's likely that you will create many virtual machines in your subscription, and it allows you to have the appropriate naming conventions in place to provide for up to 99 virtual machines. I'm gonna use vm01 as the initial name for this VM. You're next prompted for the to create this virtual machine. This does not have to match the existing resource group location, but it is a good idea to keep resources close to the users that will be using this computer, and that means the actual customers or end users that will be accessing it. So if this was a virtual machine running a web application and most users were going to be in countries such as the United Kingdom, I would go ahead and create this virtual machine in the United Kingdom so that it would be close to the users who were going to use it. In this particular case, we're creating all our resources in the East US, so we'll leave that as the default. Another option here you can see is to control the disaster recovery or availability options for the virtual machine. This has a big impact on virtual machine cost. When you add additional protection capabilities for your virtual machine, you are creating what's called replication, where Azure will replicate or synchronize your virtual machine to multiple locations to protect it in case of a disaster. We are gonna keep our costs low, so we are going to add this virtual machine with no redundancy, but this will only be recommended for test or temporary resources. Any resource that's gonna be used in production should have one of the appropriate disaster recovery options selected. Another part of virtual machine creation is selecting the hardware plan and the operating system. You can see here where it prompts us for image, we are being presented with a list of choices from Azure, which would be their currently supported operating systems. This is not a complete list. You can see there's a blue link here that says, See all images, and you can actually see every operating system currently supported at Azure. It's typically a good idea to pick the most recent releases so the ones that are presented on the screen are the most common choices. We're gonna create one based on Windows Server Data Center Edition. Once we have defined the server operating system that we would like to install, we then need to select the appropriate hardware plan. In order to see what hardware plans are available, we can hit the dropdown list option here associated with size. This is not a comprehensive list. I'm gonna click See all sizes so that we can see the large variety of virtual machine configurations that can be created. You can see there are 690 potentially virtual machine templates, and this will control the number of processors, the amount of RAM, and the amount of disc space that's going to be allocated to your virtual machine. You would analyze the requirements of your solution and make sure you have purchased the appropriate performance to satisfy your performance targets. In this particular case, we will leave it at the default, which is a dual processor computer with eight gigs of RAM. You can see that that machine is gonna cost $137 per month, and that's because it's located in the East US. The pricing can be different for different regions across the globe, so you may want to take a look at a few different regions. Pick the one that is close to you, but still perhaps the most attractive price. You can see that we are almost finished with our virtual machine setup. We've given it a name, a physical location, we've selected an operating system and determined the hardware profile that we would like to purchase. The last thing we'll need to do is enter in some administrator credentials that would allow us to access this virtual machine once it's created. We're gonna call this user account sysadmin. Now that we've entered that, we now have to enter in the appropriate password for this user account. The last option that we're presented with is how we would like to access this virtual machine once it is created. This is the ability to remote control or take control of your virtual machine from an external computer, such as your administrator workstation. It's common for Windows machines to use RDP or Remote Desktop for remote control. This is a security risk, because you are allowing this computer to be remote controlled from external environments, but this is actually a requirement when you first set your virtual machine up. There are ways to protect your virtual machine remote control, through concepts such as Bastion, which would be a recommended concept for you to follow up with in the future. Let's click Review and create, and let the Azure portal validate our initial information. Now that the Azure portal has validated the information and we have made no mistakes, we are now ready to click the Create button and this will actually allocate the appropriate hardware resources, install the operating system, set up the administrator account with the username and password that we had just entered, and then provide us with the ability to remote control this computer to continue our configuration and add additional software. Once this virtual machine has been created, we'll take a look at starting up, shutting down and getting remote access to this virtual machine. Now that the virtual machine process is complete, it's providing us with links to begin the administration of our virtual machine. Let's search for virtual machines at the top of the screen and we'll see our new VM now listed. You can see the name that we gave it, vm01. You can also see that it is located in the Demo resource group in the eastern part of the United States. It's not quite finished, so once this says it is been completely created, we'll go in and learn how to start it up, shut it down, and access this virtual machine through remote control. Now that the status has changed to Running, this virtual machine is currently available. If you look on the right side of the screen, you'll notice the public IP address that has bent assigned to this particular machine. That is our primary access method for reaching this with remote desktop. It has also given us the ability to connect with a menu item up at the top of the screen, and if you remember, Windows servers are accessed using RDP or Remote Desktop. You could also see that if the virtual machine was not started, that there are the appropriate menu options at the top of the screen to stop, restart, or start the virtual machine based upon its current status. Because our virtual machine is running, let's connect through RDP. This virtual machine has been given a public IP address that can be accessed from outside the network, so let's click Download RDP file, because I am on a Windows workstation. If I open up the RDP file on my Windows workstation, you'll notice that it's warning me from a security perspective that I'm about to access this remote computer located at this public IP address. I'm gonna select Connect. When I do, I'm prompted for the username and password that we originally set up when we created the virtual machine. Once I enter in the username and password information correctly, pass the security warning, I am now given access to the desktop of the computer that I had just created in the cloud. This is now going to give me full control over this remote Windows machine and allow me to do the additional configuration that I may need to do to finish the appropriate setup for my solution. Once the virtual machine is finished booting, I'll be prompted with a traditional Windows login screen and my creation and management of my virtual machine will be complete. Stay tuned for the next lesson, where I'll show you how to set up web application hosting. Thanks for watching!
