Azure Virtual Machines (VMs) are one of the flexible, on-demand computing options available on the Azure platform. They’re ideal when you need greater control over your computing environment than other Azure services can provide. This guide outlines key considerations before creating a VM, as well as steps for setup and ongoing management.
Using a VM in Azure offers the benefits of virtualization without the hassle of owning or maintaining physical servers. You’re responsible for managing the VM, which includes tasks like software installation, patching, and configuration.
Technical Overview OF Azure Virtual Machines
Customizable Compute: Offers full control over OS, configurations, and installed software ideal for workloads needing tailored environments.
Elastic Scalability: VM Scale Sets enable automatic instance scaling based on demand or schedules, supporting efficient resource use and high availability.
Cost Efficiency: Features like Reserved Instances, Hybrid Benefit, and Spot VMs reduce compute costs by up to 80%, without compromising flexibility.
Enterprise-grade Security: Built-in protections and compliance certifications, with real-time threat intelligence from Microsoft’s extensive security team.
Optimized Performance: Supports high-performance use cases with GPU-enabled and HPC-tuned VM variants, suitable for AI, simulations, and data-intensive applications.
Azure VMs support a wide range of use cases, such as:
Development and Testing: Quickly spin up a machine tailored to your coding and testing needs.
Cloud Applications: Scale resources up or down based on demand, paying only for what you use.
Hybrid Networking: Seamlessly extend your organization’s datacenter into the cloud via Azure’s virtual network.
Creating & Managing Azure Virtual Machines
Provisioning VMs : Azure lets you create virtual machines through various interfaces—Azure Portal, Azure CLI, or PowerShell—supporting both Windows and Linux OS environments. A diverse selection of VM sizes and configurations ensures flexibility to suit different workloads.
Monitoring & Maintenance : To oversee performance and reliability, Azure offers built-in tools like Azure Monitor and Application Insights. For resilience and continuity, Azure Backup enables quick restoration during outages or failures.
Ensuring Uptime & Resilience: For high availability and fault tolerance, Azure integrates features like Availability Zones and VM Scale Sets. These mechanisms help distribute workloads, mitigate disruptions, and maintain consistent application performance.
Step 1
- Log in to portal.azure.com – click on Menu bar or search bar – type Virtual Machine and select either from the services or from the marketplace – click ok to lunch VM wizard.
- Select your subscription – Resource group – VM name – Select a region – No infrastructure redundancy required(for the purpose of this study) – Security type – The image (for this testing I used Windows server 2025 Datacenter Edition) – select your VM architecture x64bit Azure spot (this was not selected because this VM is for study purpose) Size (Standard_D2s_v3 – 2 vcpus, 8 GiB memory ($137.24/month), this depends on the size of the VM you want to provision and it depicts the price you pay per month) – then administrative account name and password – Select Os disk type ( You also chose to attach disk. I selected delete with VM, because this VM is for study purpose) – Click Next
Note, that this comes with other resources, such as public IPs, Virtual Disks and your configurations will be based on your budget.
Step 2
- Create your virtual Network (Note; you create Vnet and attached or create it in this place) – Subnet – Create Public IP (Name, static so the Ip address will not be changing) – Nic network (This holds the public IP. However, basic was checked for the purpose of this study) – Inbound port rule (RDP is one of the port, this determines how we are going to access our VM. (Note, This is not recommended in production for this test study, it was allowed) – Click Next
Step 3
- Enable the shutdown time – Add your email address – click next – then next
Step 4
- The VM is successfully deployed – click on Go to resource – Select connect – Download RDP file – open the file – input you username and password – Click ok
You have successfully deployed your first Azure virtual machine. Our serve is now ready to use
Note, some of the features were not added to this VM because it was provision for learning and testing, more features might be required in production, and some features selected might not be required for production