Creating virtual machines in Azure, part 1

- [Instructor] We've talked about how Azure is an infrastructure as a service solution, or it provides an IaaS solution as part of its offering. And as part of that offering we can create our virtual machines to be hosted on this Azure platform. So let's take a look at the tools that we use to create virtual machines and how we create those virtual machines. First I want to highlight that there are two windows that you can use to manage your virtual machines, Virtual machines and Virtual machines classic within the portal. I'm going to go to Virtual machines which is where the new modern virtual machines are going to be created. Classic is for older virtual machines from the early iterations of Azure, and if you had those virtual machines created there that's where you will find them to manage them. So here under virtual machines I can either click on the Create virtual machine button here or click on Add to add a new virtual machine which is what I'm doing right now. So my first option here is to select my subscription if I have multiple subscription this will be the subscription that I will use to host my virtual machine. Then I can select my resource groups. So the resource group I will select is my LinkedIn RG resource group which is where I'm putting all of my resources, it's great to host all of the resources for a specific project or for an organization in a resource group if you need to remove them later on. I will need to delete all of these resources after demonstrating them. And I can just delete it straight from the resource group itself. So I don't have to go and look in the various resource groups where all my resources are located. Then I need to specify a name for my virtual machine. And the name has to meet the guideline's requirements or specifically the character types that are allowed within Azure. So let me just show you what's allowed and what's not allowed. VM1 is going to be allowed, well yes, it's not a unique name. The name of a virtual machine does not need to be unique. Now, if I put an underscore you'll notice that right away I'll receive an X basically telling me that I cannot have this type of character. So I'm going to remove that and I'm going to call it VM1LinkedIn which is an allowed name and it's within the number of characters allowed. Then I'm going to select my region. Now, if I click on the drop-down list you'll notice that I have many regions in Azure. And at the moment of filming this video, these are the regions that are available within Azure. Microsoft is constantly adding new regions as it's deploying datacenters across the world in new regions. Some regions have multiple locations. For example, East US, that has two locations, essentially multiple datacenters that are located in the same geographical region in the United States. It's important to select your region and to understand the impact of selecting a new region. When you provide resources in a region and you typically want to have those resources located close to your user population. So if most of my users are going to be located in East US I create my resources in East US to ensure an optimized access to the resources. As well if I want to provide some type of a redundance between regions specifically when we talk about storage I can specify redundance between regions. So I'm going to put my virtual machine in East US. Then under my availability options I can select either an availability zone or an availability set. Now the availability zones or the availability sets are used for virtual machine redundancy, similarly to a clustering solution that we would have in Windows. So if one virtual machine fails we have access to another virtual machine, either in another zone or within this clustering set. So we will talk about availability zones and availability sets later on in this course. Then I select the image. So if I click on my drop-down list I have a list of recommended image essentially some of the most popular images for virtual machines in Azure. I have some of the older Windows Server operating systems, like Windows Server 2012 R2, and 2016, as well as the latest Windows Server operating system, Windows Server 2019. Some Ubuntu servers are here as well. I've got some Red Hat Linux servers. And even some client operating systems such as Windows 10 Pro, and then I have it multiple versions as well. So to keep this simple I will select Windows Server 2019 Datacenter. The next option to select is the size of my virtual machine. Now you noticed that I have a size that's already been set here which is the DS1 v2 Standard size. This is essentially choosing the hardware that will host these virtual machines. So the type of hardware will of course impact my costs. So I can actually click on Change size here. And let's change the virtual machine that's selected. Now when I click on Change size you notice that I have a large number of size VMs that I can select from, all the way down to B1ls, which only has a maximum of 200 IOPS, or Input/Output Per Second. And supports premium disk and at a lower monthly cost, estimated cost of about $9.33 as I go all the way up to DS3 v2, that one has a greater number of CPUs, a greater number of RAM already allocated to it, as well a greater number of IOPS supported. So depending on the workloads that I'm expecting to host on this virtual machine I will choose one of these sizes of VMs. Again, defining the hardware that will host my virtual machine, and also defining my estimated monthly cost for managing that virtual machine. I can close that, I have my DS1 v2, that is the default that was selected by Microsoft and that has a relatively high monthly cost. Then I need to specify the username so the username will be the local user account to log in, to sign in to this virtual machine. And I'm going to give it a name here. Now, you'll notice that there are some requirements for the name as well, if I try to put Administrator it will give me an error message because Administrator is not an allowed name. Users must not include reserved words is the specific requirement here which basically states that administrator is so well-known that we don't want individuals that are trying to get in to virtual machines to be able to use these simple words to try to get in. So it's a very low level of security. I'm creating my own username here, AdminAdmin, that one is not on the reserved list. As well I need to specify my password. So you'll notice that my password requirement is at least 12 characters. So I'm going to put that password, and I'm meeting all of the password requirement, greater than 12, lower than 123, remember my recommendation, use pass phrases not passwords whenever possible. They're much easier to remember. And my passwords are now matching. Next down below I'm going to specify some inbound port rules and these are the allowed inbound ports for my virtual machine. And if I click here on Allowed selected ports I can select from a list of ports that will be allowed to my virtual machine. So think of those as the firewall settings essentially for the virtual machine. And I'm going to allow these various ports. Notice that RDP is an allowed port because RDP is a mechanism that I can use to connect remotely to the virtual machine. You have a warning here letting you know that these ports will be exposed to the Internet and therefore you need to secure the traffic using other mechanisms, and we'll talk about that in a later video in this course. The next option we have here is a licensing option which essentially allows you to use some of your existing on-premises Windows Server licensing to license this Windows server. And the Azure hybrid benefit is a Software Assurance benefit of Microsoft licensing that we can use to actually license our servers in Azure. So if I have a license I can specify the information now or I can click on No, which is what I have. So these are the first settings or the basic settings for creating a virtual machine. In the next video in this course we will look at the next settings before actually we complete the creation of the virtual machine.