This course offers an in-depth look at VM scale sets, VM configuration management, VM storage options, and VM monitoring within Azure. We kick things off by looking at VM scale sets, vertical scaling, and horizontal scaling.
After that, you'll learn about the tools used for configuration management, as well as how to deploy software using VM extensions and how to deploy an Azure PowerShell DSC Configuration.
The course will then cover the wide range of VM storage options available in Microsoft Azure and show you how to use them. Finally, you'll learn about Azure Monitor, a service that allows you to monitor the performance and health of your VMs and VM scale sets.
This course is packed full of step-by-step demonstrations that you can follow along with, allowing you to see all of the above topics put into practice in real-life Azure environments.
For any feedback relating to this course, please feel free to contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.
Learning Objectives
- Scale VMs using scale sets and understand the difference between vertical and horizontal scaling
- Learn about the tools used for managing VM configurations
- Deploy software using VM extensions and PowerShell DSC
- Understand the various VM storage options available in Azure
- Learn about Azure Monitor and its uses
Intended Audience
- Anyone interested in learning about scale sets, configuration management, storage, and monitoring for Azure VMs
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course you should have a basic understanding of Microsoft Azure and of the Azure portal.
Hello, and welcome back. In this brief demonstration. I'm going to walk you through the process of enabling Azure monitor for VMs for a single virtual machine.
On the screen here you can see I'm logged into my Azure portal, and I'm in my resource group that I created, that's called VMStuff. And in VMStuff, I have a virtual machine called MyVM. What we're going to do here is enable monitoring for this virtual machine. And it's actually a pretty, straightforward process.
From my VMStuff resource group, what I'll do here is select MyVM, and at this point I'm at the overview page for the virtual machine. To enable Azure Monitor for VMs, I simply scroll down on the left here, to the monitoring section, and under monitoring there's an option here for insights.
So we're going to go ahead and select insights. If the VM is not yet enabled for Azure monitor, you'll get this screen here, this get more visibility screen, and you'll see the blue button here to enable the VM. So what we'll do here to enable it is click the enable button, and then what happens is it prompts me for a log analytics workspace.
We can see that it's telling me here that the VM isn't currently connected to any workspace, and that I need to select an existing one. It defaults here to my lab subscription, where I'm working, and then I have an option in this dropdown, to select an existing log analytics workspace.
Now, if I didn't have a log analytics workspace available, I'd have to create one for this. Since we already have a default workspace, we'll use the one that it chose for us. And then from here we can simply click enable. And what this does is deploys insights. And once this is done, our virtual machine here will be enabled for Azure Monitor for VMs.
So let's let Azure do its thing here. And this takes a few minutes. And then once this is done, I'll show you what it looks like. We can see that our deployment has succeeded here, and we'll close this. And it's telling us that monitoring data is being collected and routed to insights.
So this can take up to 10 minutes. So what I'm going to do is pause this video, and we'll come back when this data has arrived. So hang tight. Welcome back, so our insights deployment has completed. And now if we look at the insights page under monitoring for our VM, we have two options, we have performance and we have map.
The map option allows us to discover application dependencies, while the performance tab here allows us to look at overall utilization of the VM, and its performance.
From the performance tab here, we can take a look at our logical disk performance, information on CPU utilization, Ram, IOPS, disk throughput, and all kinds of other data about our virtual machine. And if we bounce back out to the map tab here, we can see the different processes that are running on the VM, and we can see where the ports are in use for those different processes.
So this tab here, this map tab provides you with a way to view dependencies for the VM, while the performance tab allows you to view the performance of your virtual machine.
Tom is a 25+ year veteran of the IT industry, having worked in environments as large as 40k seats and as small as 50 seats. Throughout the course of a long an interesting career, he has built an in-depth skillset that spans numerous IT disciplines. Tom has designed and architected small, large, and global IT solutions.
In addition to the Cloud Platform and Infrastructure MCSE certification, Tom also carries several other Microsoft certifications. His ability to see things from a strategic perspective allows Tom to architect solutions that closely align with business needs.
In his spare time, Tom enjoys camping, fishing, and playing poker.