In my previous post I explained what a cloud service is in relation to virtual machines in Azure. I want to mention virtual networks quickly as well since it ties in with your cloud service and virtual machine network configuration before we create a VM.
If you want VMs from multiple cloud services to connect to each other via the internal network instead of public IP addresses you can add them to a virtual network. You also need a virtual network to connect your on-premise infrastructure to Azure via VPN. I will cover the details of virtual networks and VPN in a future post.
When you create a new VM you can choose to add it to an existing virtual network or you can create a new virtual network or you can create it without a virtual network. Is this screenshot I am creating a new VM and using an existing virtual network called “demo”. You will see why this matters when you run the script to create a VM.
Finally I can get to the actual demo to create a VM in Azure.
You can download Azure PowerShell modules using the Microsoft Web Platform installer. Before you can run PowerShell scripts against your Azure VMs you have to import your publish settings file. Open up PowerShell and run the following command.
Get-AzurePublishSettingsFile
This will launch the Azure Portal in your default browser, sign in and follow the instructions to download your publish settings. Remember to save the file with a .publishsettings extension and put in a directory where you can reach it easily. Back in PowerShell execute the following command to import your file that was downloaded in the previous step.
Import-AzurePublishSettingsFile PathToPublishSettingsFile.publishsettings
And here is the PowerShell script to create a new VM:
$ImageName = "a699494373c04fc0bc8f2bb1389d6106__Windows-Server-2012-R2-20150726-en.us-127GB.vhd"
$VmName = "NewVMName"
$InstanceSize = "Standard_D1"
$AdminUsername = "MyNewAdmin"
$Password = "MyNewPassword"
$Location = "West US"
$ServiceName = $VmName
#Set the image
$Img = Get-AzureVMImage -ImageName $ImageName
#Create the config
$NewVM = New-AzureVMConfig -Name $VmName -InstanceSize $InstanceSize -ImageName $Img.ImageName | Add-AzureProvisioningConfig -Windows -AdminUsername $AdminUsername -Password $Password
#Create the vm
New-AzureVM -VMs $NewVM -WaitForBoot -Verbose -Location $Location -ServiceName $ServiceName
This is a bare bones example, if you look at the documentation there are lots more you can do: Link to MSDN
Parameters Explained
$ImageName: is the name of the image you are using to create this VM. To see which VM images are available, including your own images you created, you can run: Get-AzureVMImage
$VmName: The name for you new VM.
$InstanceSize: The size of the hardware for your VM. To see which instance sizes are available use this link.
$AdminUsername and $Password is the username and password for the administrator user that will be created on this new VM.
$Location: Is the location for this new VM, to get the list of locations run: Get-AzureLocation
NOTE: If you specify the -Location or -AffinityGroup parameters Azure will create a new cloud service for this VM. In this script it will create a new cloud service with the same name as the VM, it is stored in $ServiceName. To add this VM to an existing cloud service specify the -ServiceName parameter but leave out -Location.
I didn’t specify a virtual network for this VM but you can use the -VNetName parameter to do that.
Tip: Make sure your password is valid according to Azure standards. The first one I used wasn’t and the PowerShell script didn’t fail, it happily created the VM but the admin user wasn’t valid and I had to reset the password before I was able to RDP into the machine.
Secondly when you create the storage account you can’t use zone redundant storage for VM disks.
