Let's go ahead and create a new virtual machine.
We do that by opening the Azure portal.
If I click on virtual machines you'll see that I currently have no machines set up.
I'm going to hit New at the bottom
and under Compute I'm going to select Virtual Machine.
I have the ability to both create my own or do one from the gallery.
Let's create our own first.
We're going to call this, up and running.
You'll notice it immediately checks for a DNS entry.
So, our machine will be reachable at upandrunning.cloudapp.net.
I have the ability to choose different images of LS's here that you'll see.
So, we're going to use the default Windows Server 2012 Data Center As well
as different sizes, so you'll see as
I previously described an extra small instance
at 768 MB, all the way up to a large eight core 56 GB memory instance.
I'm going to stick with the small instance, going to enter a
username and a password And then I'm going to pick a location.
So we're going to do west US, and say create virtual machine.
And that's it.
We're now setting up and provisioning inside of Azure a virtual machine.
I can
click here to get details.
So you'll see it's going to create a storage account for my virtual machine.
In fact, all of the data that we'll be
saving inside a virtual machine, is just a storage account.
This enables us to both backup and
restore disks very easily inside a virtual machines.
Now, also remember this portal is completely asynchronous,
so we can go back into virtual machines.
I can select
New and we could go ahead and we could create more.
So for example from Gallery.
As I scroll down here, you'll see I have different images, both Linux and Windows.
I have Platform images.
I have images that I've created, and disks that I've created.
If I go under platform images, and I hit Next.
You'll see I have a version release date. These release dates are based on the patch
Tuesday, where Microsoft patches server products and all of Microsoft products.
So you can see if, maybe in my environment, I want to
roll back to a previous patch, I can do that directly here.
I could give it a name.
So we'll say patch test Username and password.
And if I hit next, you'll see I also have the
option to create a new cloud service, directly from within here.
I also have the ability to do something called an availability set.
An availability set will allow you to create machines that are
on different racks inside of the server so they're in different power supplies.
If one goes down, they won't all go down.
Another feature in the availability set is that you will only
patch one machine at a time inside of that availability set.
So, I can go ahead.
I can open this up and say, create availability set, daveset.
And, I also have the ability to allow power shell remoting into here.
The portal is set up so that it's very easy to
understand how to go ahead and use different types of services.
So most options, if you don't know what they
are, you can hover over this little question mark here.
So, you'll see, Enabling Powershell Remoting will allow
you, as an admin, to go ahead and from the command shell,
connect to that machine and do a bunch of really powerful stuff.
In fact, everyting that you're seeing in the portal
here can be done by using the command line.
Let's go ahead and close this.
And we'll see how our virtual machine is doing.
You'll see up and running is now running. It's set up as a free trial subscription.
Its location
is in the West US, and its DNS name is Up and Running CloudApp.net.
I also have the ability to copy that name, right from here.
So if you're in a large enterprise environment, where you have a
specific naming scheme, this becomes a really easy way to grab machine names.
If I have multiple machines set up here, I also have the ability
to search, so maybe I have something with a naming scheme of companycoderegent,
things like that, I'll be able to search directly from here, within the portal.
Now, remember this portal is fully HTML5 based, so
I can access this portal from any type of device.
If I click on images you'll see no image has yet been created.
So once I have this virtual machine set up the way that I want it to be I
could, in fact, create an image so that in
the future I can create multiple virtual machines from
that image.
If I hit Browse VM Depot you'll notice something really cool.
Microsoft's open tech group has created
an entire repository of Linux-based image machines.
So I have the ability to scroll through all of these and
decide what type of image I want to install as a virtual machine.
In fact, if we navigate over to msopentech.com.
You'll get more information
about the group.
And if I scroll down to projects, you'll see the VM Depot from MS Open tech.
If I hit read more this will give me information
of what type of Azure virtual machines are in here.
And, in fact, we can browse this same depot through the
web and see all of the available Linux machines in here.
This becomes a great way for you to try out and
test pre-configured machines that maybe you haven't already set up within your
own environment. You can search by date, name and platform.
All of that is available right inside here.
I'm going to go ahead and close this and this and as you
can see our machine up and running is now fully set up.
We'll hit, OK, we'll hit virtual machine instance.
And you'll see we have a status of running.
If I move over here to DNS name it will give me the ability to click on that name.
And I'll
go directly to up and running. If I hit the blue thunderbolt You'll see
I've the ability to install the Azure SDK as well as any other kind of quick starts.
As we move through this course you'll see this is the beginning
page for all of the different types of documentation and quick starts.
I'm going to move over to dashboard and I'm going
to get immediately different types of statistics for my machine.
So I can choose both relative and
absolute, an hour or up to seven days and refresh this.
This is real time CPU percentage on that machine.
Something new that was just announced at the build conference
and is currently in preview is the ability to scale.
So, I can auto scale this machine.
Across my availability set, which you'll see down here.
And, if this machine reaches a certain point, or certain threshold
in its CPU, I can actually spin out
new virtual machines inside of that availability set.
I'm going to cover scale as we move through the different services, but I
wanted to point out that it's available now in preview for Azure Virtual Machines.
I also have the ability to monitor my machine.
So you'll see currently we had CPU percentage on our dashboard.
I'm going to go ahead and add a different metric.
And I'm going to say disk reads.
We're going to do aggregate and up and running.
I'll say OK.
And now in real time I get the ability to see
how much disk reads I'm doing inside of my virtual instance.
This is very similar to Perfmon Counters.
If you've used Perfmon on a Windows server before.
But I have all of that rolling up into my portal and then into my dashboard itself.
I'm also going to click on Instances. You can see
up and running status is running.
I can click on this and then I
get information about the PowerShell tools, virtual machines overview.
Again, this blue thunderbolt is your ability to
get up and running very quickly with additional information.
We're going to click on Dashboard, we're going to
move over to Endpoints and you'll see
I already have end points set up to access this machine, for both PowerShell and
Remote Desktop as well as the ability to configure new ones.
If I hit Configure you will see I can set up new end points.
I can also change the virtual machine size
as well as selecting or creating an availability set.
Remember, an availability set is a way to manage groups
of machines, so that they're fault tolerant and available while patching.
I'm going to move back here.
And
I'm going to last click on Disks.
If I click on disks, you'll see, up and running is attached to, up and running.
This is actually setup in the storage accounts.
So if we move over down here to storage, you'll
see everything's been setup for us so that, that storage.
In fact it's something called Blob storage.
Which we'll cover later on.
Is setup so that the servers disk's are
running off of Azure blob storage.
This gives us the ability to manage machine images and machine data.
Just like there are blob storage images in Azure storage.
Let's click back on Virtual Machines.
And at the bottom here on the Command bar, you'll see something called Connect.
I'm going to click that, and you'll see
we now have a up and running.remotedesktop profile.
I'm going to save this to my desktop.
We're going to move over to the desktop.
I'm going to click that Profile and I'm going to say Connect.
We're going to enter the name and password.
And we're going to say yes, don't ask me again about connections to this computer.
Now everything's been already set up in that
remote desktop profile for you from the Azure portal.
So within just a couple minutes, I've created a data
center server And I, now have the ability to remote
desktop connect in with the account that we created and
use this machine, just like I'm sitting in front of it.
We'll wait for our settings to get personalized here.
And now you'll see this is full Windows Server.
So, in fact, this server manager is coming up the first time that I been logged in.
I have the ability to configure this server, anyway I want.
So if there's something in Azure, that is not available for
what you have in your local data center, remember, virtual machines are a
way for you to create, and replicate,
anything you have in your local environment.
You can install any type of software You can install both Windows and Linux servers
on here, and then you can fully manage these servers any way that you want.
If I come down here into File Explorer, and we look
at Computer, you'll notice I have a 126 gigabyte local disk.
This disk is, in fact, the storage account that was set up in the Azure portal.
In the next section, I will show you how to create an additional
storage account so that Windows Server will see it as a new disk.