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In today’s Ask the Admin, I’ll show you how to quickly provision a virtual machine (VM) in the Azure cloud.
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Virtual machines can be provisioned in the cloud in much the same way as on a local VMware or Hyper-V server. The only difference is that you don’t have any real control over the host operating system or hypervisor, and configuration must be done through the cloud OS. The easiest way to provision a simple VM is to use a readymade template.
To provision and connect to a VM in Azure, more than just the VM is required. For instance, a storage account, network interface, and IP address must also be provisioned. But Azure Resource Manager (ARM) makes the process easy, using Resource Groups to manage the cloud apps holistically.
There are several ways to provision VMs using ARM. Today I’ll show you how to use a JSON template that’s available on GitHub and is free to use, but it’s also possible to provision VMs using ARM PowerShell or the management portal. For more information on using ARM PowerShell to provision VMs, see Deploy VMs Using Azure Resource Manager and PowerShell and Deploy VMs Using Azure Resource Manager on the Petri IT Knowledgebase.
Before you can provision a VM in the Azure cloud, if you don’t already have a subscription, sign up for a free trial here.
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Note that the template deploys an A2 size VM. For more information on VM sizes, see Microsoft’s website here.
Template to deploy a simple Windows Server Azure VM (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Provide the template parameters in the Azure management portal (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
Azure will validate the information you provided, and if successful, you’ll get a notification to say that the deployment has started in the notification center in the top right of the management portal. It might take some time for the deployment to complete. You can check the status of the deployment in the notification center.
Once the deployment has completed, you can connect to the VM remotely using Remote Desktop Connection on your PC.
Connect to the new VM using Remote Desktop Connection (Image Credit: Russell Smith)
From this menu, you can also stop, start, and delete the virtual machine.
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In this article, I showed you a quick and easy way to create a VM in the Azure cloud and how to connect to it using Remote Desktop Connection.
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