In this lesson, I'll show you the basics of virtual machines and common solutions for using them, including selecting appropriate regions, sizes, and instance types. Virtual machines are a very common and flexible resource to create in a cloud subscription. A virtual machine is exactly like it sounds. It is a computer, just like the one that you're using to watch these videos, except the computer is located up in the Azure Cloud on a remote virtual network associated with your Azure subscription. The advantage of being able to create computers in the cloud, called virtual machines, is that you have the flexibility to install any software services on the virtual machines that you need. This means they could be a direct replacement for a person's workstation, or you could repurpose one of your existing servers from your existing network and place it up in the cloud for shared remote access. Or you could create virtual machines for pure cloud solutions or perhaps even demonstrations or practice scenarios. So the cloud is very flexible, and creating virtual machines in the cloud will give you a lot of flexibility as far as how your organization can grow and what sort of purposes you could use the cloud for. Because these virtual machines have no restrictions, they'll be able to do everything that a regular Windows or Linux computer could do. Let's take a look at some of the features of virtual machines in an Azure subscription. One of the best parts of virtual machines is the flexibility for adding and removing them, or scaling them if they are under very high demand. Virtual machines can be created based upon Linux or the Windows operating system, and there are many ways to save money on virtual machines if you make them a permanent part of your cloud environment. You can see, based on the graphic, that the standard pay-as-you-go will charge you the full price for the virtual machines, but you could also do things such as reserved instances, which is called Azure Ris in this diagram. That is a commitment to Azure that you will use that virtual machine for one to three years, and by purchasing that on a guaranteed basis, you can save significant money. The ROIs plus Azure Hybrid benefits on the right hand side of that chart means that if you have Windows or SQL database licenses from your internal network, Microsoft will allow you to move those licenses up to the cloud to save a significant amount of money on your cloud expenses. Let's take a look at the virtual machine configuration screen so that we can see where the choices would be in the Azure interface for making these decisions. In order to the virtual machines that are part of this Azure subscription, we need to pull up the virtual machine menu item. We can do that by searching for virtual machines at the top of the screen in the search bar, or using the menu system on the left-hand side. Let's click on the search box and type in "virtual machines." You can see that Azure is presenting us with this choice, so let's select it. We can now see that there are no virtual machines that have been created as part of this subscription. Let's click the Create button at the top of the screen to take a look at what sort of choices we have. We can now see the Create a virtual machine configuration screen. We are now on the Basics tab. Let's take a look at some of the basic decisions that we would have to make before we would begin to build a virtual machine. You can see, as with all Azure resources, you're first requested to put this resource in a particular resource group. Once you've selected the appropriate resource group to store that virtual machine in, we will then give it a name, and the next choice is what region would you like to install this? The Azure subscription has the flexibility of allowing you to create your virtual machines in any region anywhere in the world. It's always a good idea to create virtual machines nearest to the users that will use them on a regular basis, which is not always the closest region to you. For example, if I am in the East United States and I'm building a virtual machine that will be used primarily by people in Europe, it would make more sense, from a performance standpoint, for me to select one of these European regions for the creation of my virtual machine. The performance may be a little slower for me as I try to configure that machine from the East US, but for most of the users that will use it after that point it would be faster to have that resource close to them somewhere geographically in the world. We'll leave it at the default for East US, but take advantage of the advanced capability of the cloud, which is allowing you to create resources anywhere in the world. In addition to selecting the geographical region for the resource, you're also asked for availability options. This is the ability to replicate your particular virtual machine's data disks so that if there was some sort of a hardware problem or network problem up at Azure, they would be able to recover and restore your virtual machine. By selecting Additional availability options, you do incur additional expenses, so it does cost additional money to protect your virtual machine with replication. That is a topic beyond the scope of the class, so let's keep our virtual machines simple and choose No infrastructure redundancy required. This is the best way to save money on the virtual machine. It's also a good choice for test or demo environments, which we're creating today. If we were going to use this virtual machine in a production environment, for example, as our company's web server, it would be a very good idea to create the appropriate replication options so that I would be protected from this virtual machine in a scenario of disaster recovery. You can see also that we're able to select the image type for the virtual machine. This is the operating system. Windows and Linux are the two primary choices, but you can see that there are still a lot of operating system choices within those two families of operating systems. We can click on the See all images hyperlink at the bottom of this selection to view all of the operating systems supported by Azure. This will include many versions of the Windows operating system, including Windows 10 and Windows 11 desktop operating systems, and the Windows server. You can also see that there is a very large collection of Linux-based operating systems as well. Pick the operating system that provides the capabilities that you need for the solution. For this example, we're just gonna click Window server and select one of the most recent versions. Now that we have selected the region and the operating system, the last choices that we'll be presented with would be authentication information for the first administrator account. Now that we have selected the operating system that we would like for this virtual machine, the next decision that we make is selecting the appropriate hardware plan. Let's click the size option to see what sort of default hardware plans were being presented with. You can see that the hardware plans also include a budget. If we were to keep this virtual machine running 24 hours a day for the entire month, this is just a small collection of the operating system plans available. Let's click on See all sizes to look at all of the virtual machine configuration plans available to us. According to this configuration screen, there are 690 combinations for virtual machines to be created. These are unique combinations of processor type, amount of ram, amount of data disks, and the amount of temporary storage associated with the VM. The virtual machine will need all these resources while it's running, and you can predict the appropriate performance and demand for this machine based upon your application requirements. Once you have an approximate idea of the best hardware plan to choose, you can select one and click the Select button at the bottom of the screen. You can always change your mind, so you are able to upgrade or downgrade the hardware plan after creation. So if you create the virtual machine and find that it is not powerful enough, you can upgrade to a more powerful hardware plan. The final rules for configuring the machine would be related to user credentials for the first account to be created, and what sort of ports you would like to open up for remote control. We'll cover those in more detail in a future section. Stay tuned for the next lesson where I will show you specifically how to create a Windows virtual machine. Thanks for watching.
