Creating Azure VMs

Edited Transcript

In this video, I’m going to go through the process of setting up a virtual machine in Azure for the system administration class. This is really useful for students that either have a newer MacBook that aren’t able to virtualize Windows Server yet, but it’s also useful for anybody that either has a lower powered system that wants to virtualize things in the cloud, or if you just want to get more experience working with Azure as a cloud service provider. So to get access to Azure, we’re going to start at the CS support page, which is support .cs .ksu .edu. And in here under the FAQs, there’s a link right here that says, I need some software by Microsoft. If you click that link, that will take you to this page. And right here, it has this link for the Microsoft Azure DevTools for Teaching. This link tends to change over time, but this page will always be kept up to date with the correct link. So I’m going to click that link, and it’s going to take me to a page where I can sign in. This used to use a different account system. Now it actually uses your K -State single sign -on account. So I’m going to go ahead and sign in to Azure using that account. It’s going to take me to my organization sign -in page. So I’ll sign in through K -State. It may need to do two factor if it needs to. And then it will pop in and take me to this page.

I’m going to tell it to stay signed in because this is my computer. On a shared computer, you might not want to do that. Here, it looks like I’ve got an error fetching tenants. I’m just going to refresh this page real quick to make sure that it is able to fetch everything. There we go. Okay, so here on this education overview, you should see your available credits. Hopefully you’ve got credits available. If not, there is a place where you can go to renew these, and we’ll look at that in just a minute. But what I’m going to do is I’m going to switch over to the Azure virtual machine dashboard. So I’m going to go over here to this menu, and I’m going to choose dashboard. And so this takes me to the dashboard. Right now, there’s no resources to display or anything. And if I go down here to all resources, it will also show me all of the resources that are available. There’s some other options here, such as virtual. virtual machines and load balancers and everything like that. So there’s a lot of different things that you can look at here on this resources. So feel free to play around with this and see what all is available. It will keep track of recents. For example, there is a view for subscriptions. And so if you find the view for subscriptions, this is where I can actually see your Azure for students. If you need to renew it, I believe you can do it from this view right here. So you just have to find subscriptions in the services list.

But we’re going to go to virtual machines. So under the menu, I just found virtual machines and we’re going to create a couple of virtual machines here and get them to talk to each other. So the first thing I’m going to do is I want to create an Azure virtual machine. All right, so we’ve got a virtual machine. I can use my Azure for students. I can create a resource group. I’m going to use the CIS 527 resource group that I created earlier. You can create new resource groups as you want. I’m going to call this Windows Server 2022 video, just so I know which one this is. We’re going to create it in the US East region in whatever availability zone is available. I’m just going to create it in Zone 1. One thing I need to do is remember that all of my VMs need to be created in the same zone, so I’m using US East Zone 1. Then I can choose my image. There are a few different images that you can choose from. I’ve done this before, so I have these in the recently used. For the Windows Server, I’m going to look for Windows Server 2022 Data Center Azure Edition. What you don’t want is the core. If you look there is an Azure Edition, there are also some Azure Edition core options.

If I look at Windows Server here, you’ll see that there are a lot of different Windows Server images out there. You’ll need to look at all these different versions. What you want is the Azure Edition without the core. You can look through tons and tons and tons of these. But as I showed on that previous machine, I want Windows Server 2022 Data Center Azure Edition, and I want it without the core. I want Small Disk, Windows Server 2022. Looks like there are tons and tons and tons of these. Azure Edition Core, Azure Edition Core, Azure Edition. There we go. Windows Server 2022 Data Center Azure Edition. I’m just going to grab one of these. I’m going to grab that one. You can see that that’s the one that I had previously, Azure Edition X64 Gen2. We’re going to run it on X64. We can run it with Azure Spot Discount, which is a discounted rate. I’m not going to turn that on right now.

We’re going to run this on a standard B1A. this CPU, you can run it with more memory and actually if you can, I recommend doing it. There are a lot of different ones available but I’m gonna just try and run this on a standard B1S. So we’re gonna hit review and create. Let’s see, basics. Oh yes, I need to go back here to the basics and I need to set a password. So I’m going to use CS5 .27 as my username and then I’m going to use this generated password as a default password. I have it off screen in a notepad just so I remember that password and I’m gonna make sure that I enable the remote desktop port so that I have that available. So now we’re gonna go to review and create. It’s going to create this, it’s going to set up my subscription credits. So I’m gonna hit create and this will actually create my virtual machine. This process may take a little bit so you’ll see up here, it’s submitting the deployment. and it’s doing the deployment in progress. And so it will take a little bit to run this deployment. And then once it’s done, I’ll show you how to connect to that virtual machine.

OK, so that took about a minute or so to complete. So once the deployment is complete, I can click this option to say Go to Resource. There are also some things that I can do such as set up auto shutdown. So I’m going to click on that real quick and go to this auto shutdown. You can enable it to shut down on an automated schedule just in case you don’t forget. This helps you conserve resources. Basically, if you’re not using your VM, you should shut it down so that you’re not using up any of your resources. I’m not going to set this up right now, but it’s something to keep in mind that you can do. So I’m going to go to this back here, and then I’m going to click Go to Resource. And this will take me to the overview of the resource. So some of the things that you’ll notice is it’s booting up right now. So it says the virtual machine agent status is not ready, probably because the VM’s not fully booted yet. So that’s okay. We’re not going to worry about that too much right now. Instead, we’re going to try and connect to this system. And so we can either hit Connect or Connect via Bastion. I’m just going to connect to the system. And so it’s going to show me what the public IP address is of the system, the username and the port, and it will let me download the native RDP. They also have some other different things you can do, such as going through a Bastion, a serial portal, an admin center. There are lots of different ways you can do it. I’m going to play around with just the native RDP, which is really the thing that is easiest to use. So I’m going to click this to download the RDP file, which downloads this remote desktop profile. And then if I open this file, it’s actually going to open up the remote desktop viewer on my system. And so I’m going to switch my window capture to grab that.

Okay, so once I download that RDP file and open it up, it will eventually come up and ask me for my credentials to… connect to that system, it has my username prefilled. I’m just gonna type in my password and check mark, remember me and hit okay. And then it will pop up and ask me if I want to connect to that system. So eventually it will configure that remote session and we’ll see here that it will pop up and I’m gonna make this a little bit smaller so that we can see what’s going on. And let me actually try and window capture that. All right, so our virtual machine is loading right now.

Okay, so I tried to connect to this virtual machine but it’s been giving me a lot of issues and I think it has to do with the fact that it only has one virtual CPU and one gigabyte of memory. So we’re gonna go ahead and scale up the Windows server just so that we have a little bit more access to this. So I’m going to click the stop button to stop this virtual machine and then we’re going to rescale it. So to do that, I need to wait for this stopping virtual machine. So this will take maybe a minute or so for it to stop. and then we will go through and rescale it. Okay. So once the virtual machine has stopped, then I’m going to go down here on the side, and I’m going to scroll down to find availability and scale, and then look at the size option. So there are a lot of different sizes that we can use. Currently, we’re using B1S, which is free services eligible. I’m going to change this to one of the other options. So you’ll notice that these prices go up very, very quickly. And so generally, the B series is the best series for what you want to use. And so they’ve got some of these different sizes, but you’ll notice that they get very, very pricey very quickly. So I’m going to choose the next one up, which is the B2S. So I’m going to resize it to a B2S. This is going to be a little higher. It’s going to take up some of your actual Azure credits, but as long as you’re not running your virtual machines for too long, you won’t use up your credits very quickly. Like that showed, it will use up $36 a month if you run it continuously for a full month. So you shouldn’t need to run it too long. So I’ve resized this up to a B2S, which gives me a little bit more size. So now if I refresh that page, it should bring up the correct size for the system now. Yeah, standard B2S, two virtual CPUs, four gigabytes of memory.

So now let’s start this up and see if we can connect to it. So we’re going to let it start. And then once it’s done starting, we’re going to go to the Connect tab and we’re going to download that RDP file again and connect to it through that. All right, so finally I’ve got connected to this. So I now have my virtual machine running here on remote desktop, and I can manage everything just as if I’m working locally on that machine. It should be pretty performant when you’re running it on a B2S system. So for example, here I can go to Computer Management. I can see all the computer management tools. I can see the server manager dashboard, and I should have full admin access to this version. virtual machine to do whatever I want. Unfortunately, I’m recording this on an ultra wide monitor and it defaults to full screen. So you’ll notice that I have a lot of screen space and you can’t really see what’s going on here. But from here, you should be able to follow along with everything you need to do in this virtual machine in order to actually set up a Windows Active Directory.

So the other thing that I’m going to show you real quick on the system is PowerShell. So I’m just going to in this search box here, I’m gonna load up PowerShell real quick. And then what I’m going to do is zoom in a little bit so we can see what’s going on here in PowerShell. So in PowerShell, I’m going to check the IP config and we’ll see that we have this adapter right here that is set to 10 .0 .0 .4. And we’ll need to remember that because that’s the IP address of the internal network that we’re working on. This 172 .178 .112 .59, the external address that it gave us is different than the internal IP address that we have. in our network in Azure, and we’ll look at that in just a second. So I’m going to leave this running, I’m going to leave this connected, but I’m going to switch back to Chrome and we’re going to create another system real quick.

All right, so back here in Chrome, I’m going to go back to my Azure services, I’m going to go to my virtual machines, and we’re going to create another Azure virtual machine. And so this one, again, I’m going to add to my CS5 .27 resource group. This, I’m going to call it Windows 11 video. I’m going to put it in the same availability zone. I’m going to create it using the Windows 11 Pro VM, X64. I’m also going to run this on a B2S just to give us a little bit more power. This one should run okay on a B1S, but I’m going to go ahead and upgrade it to a B2S just to have that extra power to make this work a little bit easier. So we’re going to run it on a B2S. We’re going to set up a username and I’m going to use a different password for this. So I’ve got my password already set up there, allow remote desktop. And then we’re going to confirm that we have an eligible license with multi -tenant hosting rights. We do because we’re working through the student licenses that we have. So we’re going to confirm that we have that. So now we’re going to hit review and create and it’s going to create this virtual machine for us. So we’ll let it create this. And then same as before, once it gets created and deployed, we’re going to download that remote desktop file and open it up on remote desktop so we can see what’s going on. And I’ll come back to this video as soon as this is done deploying.

Okay, so once again, this resource is now deployed. I’m going to click go to resource. It’s still booting up. So you may not get a little error here, but I’m just going to go to connect. I’m going to download the RDP file. And then I’m going to open that RDP file. It will… will pop up and prompt me to connect to that system. You won’t be able to see this because I can’t window capture it because it’s a protected window. But as soon as this comes up, I will switch over and show you that connection and show that the two systems can talk to each other. Okay, so after a couple of minutes, this machine comes up. I have to click through some of the initial setup process on Windows 11, just like any other machine. But now I am here on my remote desktop looking at my Windows 11 machine. I’ve got PowerShell opened up. So I’m gonna make that a little bit bigger so that we can see what’s going on here with that window. And once again, I’m just gonna type in IP config. And you’ll notice this is assigned the IP address 10 .0 .0 .5. And so that tells me what its IP address is on the internal network that these other systems can talk to. And so if I try and ping 10 .0 .0 .4, I should probably not get a response because Windows server has a firewall on it. But those two are both actually in the same network and they should be able to respond. Let me actually jump to Windows Server real quick and check the firewall and see if I can ping the other way around.

Okay, so for testing this, I went into the Windows firewall and I found the options for core networking diagnostics, ICMP echo request, and I enabled those on domain and private networks so that we can actually receive a ping from the systems. And so now if I switch back to my Windows Server, if I go here to Windows Server, I can now ping that IP address of 0 .0 .5, which is the Windows 11, and I received that ping response back. So we’re actually able to talk to each other. This is really important to know when you’re setting up your Active Directory. Basically your server is going to have one IP address and you won’t be able to set a static IP address on it. You’ll just leave the IP address alone. And then on your Windows client, you’ll know the address is 10 .0 .0 .5 or something similar. And you’ll have to set up a host file entry for this. I’ll kind of talk anybody through that that has any questions. But this is the basic idea for setting up virtual machines in Azure. You can also go through the same process to set up an Ubuntu virtual machine. It’s basically the same process as anything else. So if you have any questions or any issues with that, let me know. Otherwise, I’m happy to help. So feel free to ask any questions you have.