You might be a developer or administrator who is learning and working with the cloud and Microsoft Azure for the time. You might be an IT leader, a programme or project manager who needs to understand what the cloud can deliver in terms of business value then this Getting started with Azure series will be useful to you.

This blog is the first in a series of blogs about working with Microsoft Azure. For the beginner and in this first post we will show how you can create a simple VM in Microsoft Azure.

Getting started with Azure: Free Azure Account

You will need a subscription. You can signup at portal.azure.com for a free account here https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/free/ you will qualify for £150 or $200 free credit that will last for 30 days so it should give you time to explore a lot of the features.

Create a Virtual Machine

We will look at creating a virtual machine, and we’ll break it down into simple steps.

1. Log in to the Azure portal using your free account

2. Using the search tool find Virtual machines and click Add.

3. On the Create a virtual machine blade and the basics tab, complete the information below, we’ll accept the default settings for everything else.

•     Subscription: Choose your subscription
•     Resource group: click create new and myVMRG
•     Virtual machine name: myVMName
•      Location: (Europe) UK SOUTH
•      Image: Windows Server 2019 Datacenter
•      Administrator account username: azusername
•      Administrator account password: Pa$$w0rd1234
•      Inbound port rules – Select ports RDP (3389) and HTTP (80) – needed for remote desktop and access and port 80 will allow us to connect to the webserver if we enable it in a future post

4. On the Management Tab under the monitoring section, turn Boot Diagnostics to OFF

5. Accept the remaining defaults and then click Review and Create

6. When the validation has finished and passed click, Create and wait for the machine to deploy. This process might take 5-10 minutes. You will receive updates on the deployment on the notifications icon in the top menu bar

Using the VM

Congratulations you have just deployed your first IaaS VM in Azure. It a simple process in 10 steps you have a full-blown Windows Server VM running in Azure.

In a later blog, we will configure IIS and looks at how we can view the IIS home page. Remember if you leave the VM running, it will burn that valuable credit, delete the VM when you have finished it to save yourself some money.

If you liked this, then you might be interested in my our Azure Fundamentals course running Monday 6th July. You can register for just £99. You can sign up here or contact us for more information.