Azure Virtual Machines
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One of the biggest benefits of that service is you don’t need an over-big machine to go ahead and host the virtual machine. So instead of actually investing in hardware, ensuring that everything is up and running, you can go ahead and make use of the Azure virtual machine service to spin up a virtual machine on the cloud. You can spin up different types of machines. So if you want a Windows server, if you want an Ubuntu server machine, you can go ahead and use the service on the cloud. So there’s no need for you to go out and invest in hardware, buy all the hardware, buy all the storage. Make sure the network is in place. Nothing. You can just start using the service on the cloud to start building your virtual machines.
What is Azure Virtual Machine?
An Azure virtual machine is an on-demand, scalable computer resource that is available in Azure. Virtual machines are generally used to host applications when the customer requires more control over the computing environment than what is offered by other computing resources.
Virtual Machine Services
Compute — This is your compute service on the Azure platform. On Azure Virtual Machine you can create compute resources on-demand.
Operating System — You can choose from operating systems such as Windows Server 2019 and different flavors of Linux.
Lifecycle — You can create the machine whenever you want. You can also terminate the machine whenever required.
Workload — You can then install different workloads on the machine.
Deploy Virtual Machine — Theory
When you deploy a virtual machine, there are a lot of other aspects that are deployed along with it. So, I want to give a quick explanation of all of these aspects.
So, the first thing is the virtual machine itself. This is a compute resource on the Azure platform. It is an infrastructure as a service. Here, underlying physical servers are managed by Azure and you can quickly host a virtual machine.
This virtual machine will have a disc associated with it. This is an OS disc, so just like a normal machine that has a disc in place, this is for storing information. Similarly, the virtual machine can have an OS disk for the operating system, at the same time you could also attach other discs, which could be used for hosting the data.
Then virtual machine needs to be part of a virtual network. So even in an on-premise data center, when you have machines in place, they need to be part of a network. So a virtual network is an isolated network on the cloud. So the virtual machine needs to be part of the virtual network.
Now, when you go to the wizard, so when we create a virtual machine, they’ll be a wizard that will direct us on how to create the machine and that wizard will actually show us or it will help us create the virtual network. So in order to deploy a virtual machine, you don’t need to understand the beginning of all of the details, because everything will be managed by the wizard for you in case you are not aware of the networking aspects.
We also have a virtual network interface this is attached to the virtual machine. So this is like having a network interface card. So all of the data that goes into the virtual machine and comes out actually goes, via the virtual network interface.
We then have a network security group that is attached to the virtual network interface that helps to control the inbound and outbound traffic.
Then we have a public IP address. This actually allows us to communicate with the virtual machine from the Internet.
And remember, all of the resources that get created need to be part of a resource group that is used for a logical grouping of resources and need to be part of a subscription that is used for billing aspects.
Virtual Network — Isolated network On the cloud
Public IP Address — Allows contacting with the machine from the Internet
Network Security Group — Filters traffic to and from the machine
OS Disk — Used to store the operating system
Before building an Azure Virtual machine you should be familiar with some of the theoretical sections.
