A pictorial guide to creating Windows VM on Azure

In this write-up, I will be guiding you through how to set up a Windows VM on Microsoft Azure. It will be a pictorial guide highlighting best practices and cost savings methodology.

A VM- Virtual machine, is like your physical system but virtually implemented. This gives you flexibility in hardware design decisions and cost savings as you only pay a fraction of the cost, you also pay only for what you use.

Step 1: You need a valid Azure subscription

Step 2: You need to create a Resource Group. This is a like a container for your resources to enable you to organize and manage resources as necessary. This is done by

Clicking a resource group.
You need to name your Resource group to suit your requirements. Select a region
then click on Create and review

Step 3: After creating your Resource Group. Go back to home and click on "Create a Resource"

Step 4: You need to setup the necessary parameters

Project details
- Confirm the subscription account to use
- Specify the resource group, you may also opt to create one at this stage

Instance details: You will need to specify
- Virtual machine name: This is the name of your virtual computer.
- Region: This is the Azure region where your virtual machine will be hosted. Due to the cost of labour and cost of energy, various regions have different cost implications. You should select a region most suitable for your need.
- Availability options: You need to weigh the sensitivity of your virtual machine and redundancy level. Choose the option that best suits your purpose. The higher the level of availability- replicating your VM in different availability zone and regions will impact the cost.
- Security type:

You also need to select your image: The image is the operating system for your virtual machine. Upon selection, they may be some messages like errors, this will clear off after some seconds.
You need to specify the hardware specification of your virtual machine to determine the hardware and RAM.

Administrative Details

You will need to specify the username and password of your virtual machine

Inbound port rule

You need to access your Virtual machine after creation via the internet. They are different ways to access the machine, options available are RDP (Remote desktop protocol), HTTP and SSH. For this example, we will use the RDP

Congratulations!!! At this stage, you have completed the Basic requirements for your Virtual machine creation. Other steps are summarized below
Disks

Networking

Management

It is important to manage our costs. The virtual machine can be set to auto-turnoff when we are sure it will not be in use. A notification is sent before turning off.

Click next till you get to Tag

Tag:

Useful to help you monitor all instances of your resource. You need to give a friendly tag to the Virtual machine, this tag helps to identify any instances relating to the VM.

Review and create:

At this stage, if any parameters are not set appropriately, you will get a notification to fix it, for example, if the password was not specified.

If the parameters are all good, you will get the verification-passed notification.

You can also review all parameters set at this stage

Now your virtual machine is created

The next stage is to access your newly created Windows Virtual Machine. You need to ensure the Virtual machine is in the running stage before connecting