Creating Virtual Machines in Azure IaaS
Now that you understand the basics of Microsoft Azure IaaS, let’s focus on some key
aspects of using the Microsoft Azure management portal, explain some of the options,
and then walk you through a simple creation using PowerShell.
As previously mentioned, the management of Microsoft Azure can be performed
through the Microsoft Azure management portal at https://portal.azure.com. Through
the portal, you have access to all of the various datacenters that can host Microsoft
Azure services, and where you wish to host your Microsoft Azure infrastructure is one
of the first things that you need to decide. You should pick the location closest to
where the services will be consumed because this will result in the lowest network
latencies.
If you followed the video on creating a Minecraft VM, you would have seen that two
constructs are required to create a virtual machine: a virtual network on which to
place the VM’s NIC and a storage account to host the VHD file that will be used by the
virtual machine. During the creation of the virtual machine, you can use an automated
virtual network and an automatically generated storage account, or you can create
them in advance manually. In most cases, you should create the virtual network and
storage accounts in advance along with the Resource Groups. Otherwise, every VM
will be siloed in its own network, thereby limiting communication. Both the virtual
network and the storage account can and often should be used by more than just the
virtual machines, but they can also be used for the other types of roles available
within Microsoft Azure. A VM can use a virtual network and storage account only in
the same region as where the VM is being created. It would not be efficient to have
virtual machines running in one datacenter using storage in another datacenter,
hundreds of miles away.
The Microsoft Azure management portal is intuitive, and the only information needed
to create a VM is the name of the VM and a region in which you wish to create it.
Creating a storage account is a similar intuitive process; simply give a unique name
for the storage account URL and pick the location. Because the storage account name
must be unique throughout all of Azure, simple names are unlikely to be available, so
focus on using something containing an aspect of your organization’s name. You can
also select the replication options for the storage account, which can be locally
redundant or geo-redundant. A virtual network is also easy to create; the only critical
information is the region and the IP address space, which must not overlap with any
IP address space used on premises or in other virtual networks.
When I am starting in Azure, I think about creating resources in the following order:
1 . How will I create subscriptions? Will I have an Enterprise Agreement (EA) and
delegate department and account administrators to create the subscriptions for
various projects?