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What is a Virtual Machine?
What is a Virtual Machine?
Difficulty
Intermediate
Duration
1h 27m
Students
10734
Ratings
4.8/5
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Description

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.

For any feedback you may have relating to this course, please contact us at support@cloudacademy.com.

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.

Transcript

Hi there. Before we get into the fun stuff, let’s take a look at what Azure virtual machines are.

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 compute resources. When you leverage a virtual machine to host your application, you get the flexibility of virtualization without the need to buy or maintain any underlying physical hardware. That said, you will have to manage the typical tasks that are associated with any other server, including configuration, patch management, and software installation.

Because they are quick and easy to set up, Azure virtual machines are often used to deploy development and test environments. Organizations will also use Azure virtual machines to host their applications in Microsoft Azure, due to their pay-as-you-go nature, which allows you to only pay for VM’s when you need them. Azure virtual machines are also often used to extend on-prem data centers to Microsoft Azure, because VM’s that are attached to a virtual network can communicate with on-prem environments over a site to site VPN.

When designing an application infrastructure that includes Azure VMs, there are important considerations to think about. You should think about virtual machine naming conventions as well as where you are VM’s will be deployed. Generally speaking, virtual machines in Azure should be deployed in locations that are closest to those who will be accessing those VM’s.

Other important considerations include VM sizing requirements and the number of VM’s that will be needed, especially since Microsoft Azure imposes CPU and virtual machine quotas that you may or may not need to have lifted.

You should also think about what operating system you’re VM’s will need to run and what the configuration of your VM’s should look like once they start.

About the Author
Students
81999
Courses
86
Learning Paths
63

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.