In this blog, we will see What is a Virtual Machine? and How to create a Virtual Machine in Microsoft Azure?
Also, we will look into few points in context of AZ 900 exam.
What is a Virtual Machine?
Azure virtual machines provide a fully configurable and flexible computing environment. You may create VM in Azure portal to get more control over computing environment.
A virtual machine in Azure allows you to do computing without buying any physical hardware, with no maintenance.
To create a Virtual Machine in Azure, you must consider below points –
1. What OS you need?
2. What size of VM your business required?
3. What software you need to run your business?
For Microsoft Azure Certification list visit this link Microsoft Azure Certification List
Azure Virtual Machine Features
- Create and manage Virtual Machines
- Manage load balancing and auto scaling
- Add storage to VMs
- Manage network and connectivity
How to create a Virtual Machine in Azure?
Follow below steps to create Virtual Machine in Azure portal. You may use same steps to create a Windows Virtual Machine and Linux VM.
Open below url
https://portal.azure.com
Login to your Azure Portal
Click on Virtual Machine from left menu
Now choose a VM size which suits your need and budget.
You may filter by Compute Type, Disk Type
On the Settings page, in Network > Network Security Group > Select public inbound ports, select HTTP and RDP (3389) from the drop-down. Leave the rest of the defaults and select OK.
That’s all, Your VM will be ready as per your provided information.
You may download rdp file by clicking on connect, to connect your Virtual Machine remotely.
Virtual Machine Availability
Azure VM offers 99.99 % uptime which is also called as four 9’s availability.
99.95 % availability means – 22 minutes of downtime in a single month.
What is Availability Set?
Availability set is a logical grouping of Virtual Machines.
Types of Availability Set
- Fault Domain – A group of Virtual Machines sharing common power sources and network. In this set if power failure happens, all of the Virtual Machine will stop responding.
- Updated Domains – A group of Virtual Machines that are rebooted at the same time. It implies that all updated and maintenance will occur at the same time.
To achieve high availability, distribute your Virtual Machines across multiple Fault Domains. You can do this in Availability option while creating Virtual Machine resource.
Virtual Machine Scale Set
It allows you to create and manage a group of Azure VMs. Also supports, manual and auto scaling.
You can create 1,000 VM instances in a single scale set.
By default, a scale set creates a private IP address, but we can change to allowed multiple ports like 80, 443 etc.
How to set Auto Scaling?
Auto Scaling is one of the best feature of Cloud service providers.
We can set Auto scaling with multiple conditions like number of VM instance to add or remove.
Auto scaling of VMs in Azure portal can be set based on few parameters, such as –
- CPU Threshold (%)
- Memory Usage
Types of Auto Scaling in Azure
There are mainly 2 types of Auto scaling in Azure.
- Vertical Scaling – It increases the hardware resources in existing VMS. For example – increase RAM, Hard Disk. But, there is a limitation in Vertical Scaling.
- Horizontal Scaling – In this scaling, instead of managing hardware resource, we increase or decrease no of VMs instances based on requirement. So, we can deploy multiple instances of Virtual Machine in horizontal scaling.
Vertical Scaling vs Horizontal Scaling
- Horizontal scaling is less expensive compare to Vertical scaling.
- Horizontal scaling increases the availability.
FAQ on Virtual Machines
Q. How to protect VMs from datacenter failures?
Answer- Deploy VMs to multiple Availability Zones.
Q. If VM is stopped, will you be charged?
Answer- Yes, if storage is attached then you will be charged for storage only.
Note: Price of VMs may change with time and Azure regions.
You may like below blogs –
What is Microsoft Azure?
Explore Microsoft Azure
Azure Resource Manager
