This course will give you a basic understanding of Azure virtual machines (VMs) and how you can use them in your Azure environments.
The course begins by introducing you to Azure VMs and what resources are necessary to deploy them, before moving onto pricing and the different virtual machine options available. Next, the course explores availability sets and availability zones and gives a demonstration that shows you how to create an availability set using the Azure portal.
The course shows how to deploy both Windows and Linux virtual machines, and you'll get a demonstration of how to deploy and connect to each. Rounding off the course is a section on basic management tasks; you’ll learn how to start, stop, restart, redeploy, and resize virtual machines.
This course is packed full of real-world demonstrations from within the Azure portal to give you first-hand experience of how to get the most from Azure Virtual Machines.
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Learning Objectives
- Gain a foundational understanding of Azure virtual machines, their features, and their pricing
- Learn how to set up availability sets
- Learn how to create and connect to both Windows and Linux virtual machines with Azure
- Learn how to manage your Azure VMs including starting, stopping, restarting, redeploying, and resizing VMs
Intended Audience
This course is intended for anyone who is interested in learning about the basics of Azure virtual machines.
Prerequisites
To get the most from this course you should have a basic understanding of Microsoft Azure and of the Azure portal.
Welcome to Azure VM pricing. There are several ways to purchase Azure virtual machines. You can purchase them on a pay-as-you-go basis, or you can purchase reserved VM instances. You can also use spot pricing to purchase unused compute capacity.
Leveraging pay-as-you-go allows you to pay for your compute capacity by the second. Pay-as-you-go requires no long-term commitments nor any upfront payments. You can increase compute capacity as you need it and decrease it when you don’t. You pay only for what you use. Pay-as-you-go pricing is recommended for customers who prefer the low cost and flexibility of Azure VMs.
When you purchase a reserved VM instance, what you are doing is making an advance purchase of a virtual machine for either one year or for three years. This commitment is made up front and it gets you a savings of up to 72% when compared to pay-as-you-go pricing. You would typically opt for reserved VM instances when you have applications with steady-state usage or if you are looking for budget predictability. Of course, only those customers who can commit to using a VM for at least a year can take advantage of reserved VM instances.
Spot pricing allows an organization to purchase unused Azure compute capacity at a discount of up to 90% when compared to pay-as-you-go prices. However, workloads that are run on spot instances must be able to tolerate interruptions. Spot pricing is good for customers who are running interruptible applications and are looking to drastically lower their compute costs. Workloads that must meet an SLA are not good candidates for Azure VM spot pricing.
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.