Create and configure virtual machines
1. Create and configure virtual machines
Azure virtual machines (VMs) are scalable, on-demand computing resources in Azure cloud. They play a crucial role in practice by providing flexibility, scalability, and efficient resource utilization for various workloads, from development and testing to running production applications. Next, we will be creating and configuring a virtual machine within Azure cloud. Virtual machines are complex cloud resources that require the creation of additional supporting elements. We will now observe how these concepts are applied in practice. We start by creating a new resource group. This is the resource group that will host all the elements of our VM. We will use "West US" region as the location of the resource group. Once the resource group is created, we navigate to it and we initiate the creation of a virtual machine. A new dialog box will open up where we will need to fill in multiple configuration options. Since we've started the creation from our intended resource group, we notice this is already preselected accordingly. We fill in a name for the virtual machine. And we'll configure the availability options to "No infrastructure redundancy required". However, it's essential to highlight that this is the section where you have the opportunity to protect the virtual machine from outages. In a production environment, we would certainly choose a configuration to enhance resilience and protect against potential disruptions. We choose one of the most popular VM images for this demo - Windows 11 Pro. Next option to configure is the size of the virtual machine. This will dictate the performance of the VM and also the monthly cost. A couple of sizes are already recommended, but we can review the entire list. A VM with 2 CPUs and 8 GB of RAM should be enough for now. Next, we need to configure the administrator username and password. We will use "localadmin" as the username and a strong random generated password. To enable Internet access to this virtual machine, we must keep port 3389 open, as it is currently selected. We leave all the options as is, but we mark the checkbox stating we have a license to use Windows 11 since this VM will be used only for demonstration purposes. We go to the next tab where we can configure the associated disks. We can set the size of the OS disk, the one that is hosting the operating system as well as its type. We don't need the additional performance an SSD offers and we go with a standard HDD instead. In this screen, we can also attach additional drives if needed - new or existing ones. This action can also be performed later. Next we go to the "Networking" section. Since we do not have any existing VNET we could link to, Azure will create one for us. It also suggests to have a public IP so that the virtual machine can be accessed from the Internet. Everything looks good so we do not need to change anything in this screen. The same applies for all the next tabs, that are for advanced IT administrators. We can jump to the final assessment screen. Once the validation is completed we can create the virtual machine. After the virtual machine was created we can navigate to the resource. Observe the vast array of configurations we can perform on the virtual machine. Feel free to explore the numerous available options if you find them interesting or relevant to your needs. Now it is your turn to create and configure a virtual machine of your own in the next exercise.2. Let's practice!
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