Azure - Deploying Virtual Machines

Understand the Azure IaaS deployment model and your responsibility for managing the virtual machine OS and patches, with pre-configured sizes and a 4 TB VHD limit (only VHD files supported).

Choose Azure IaaS VMs to ensure high availability with a 99.9% SLA, scale for cyclical and spiking workloads, and pay only for what you use.

Contrast classic azure service manager deployments with arm, where classic treats a vm as a single unit, while arm enables resource groups, templates, and RBAC for granular management.

Explore Azure virtual machine sizes, including general purpose, compute optimized, memory optimized, storage optimized, and GPU instances, and learn sizing by cores, RAM, and disks.

Learn to estimate Azure VM costs with the pricing calculator, including pay-as-you-go and reserved options, and use cost management tools to optimize across Azure, on premises, and other clouds.

Explore deploying Azure VMs via the portal, comparing resource manager versus classic deployment, configuring resource groups, storage options, networks, and security settings for a Windows Server VM.

Learn how arm templates automate Azure deployments by composing virtual networks, storage accounts, and virtual machines into reusable templates, with parameters, master templates, and quickstart examples.

Learn how Azure virtual machines use availability sets to achieve high availability and scalability by spreading across update domains and fault domains, improving the SLA.

Create and deploy an availability set in Azure, choosing managed or classic disks, and add multiple virtual machines to distribute across fault domains and update domains for high availability.

Explore operating system, temporary, and data disks, noting OS caching and the temporary disk for swap; choose managed or unmanaged and standard or premium disks to balance cost and throughput.

Compare managed and unmanaged disks for Azure VMs, highlighting automatic distribution and higher throughput of managed disks versus storage account limits, per-disk IOPS, and usage-based costs of unmanaged disks.

Add a data disk to an Azure virtual machine by selecting disks, creating a standard disk, placing it in a storage container in your storage account, and saving the configuration.

Connect to Azure virtual machines with a downloaded RTP file and login, noting the self-signed certificate warning. Manage disks with disk manager, and access via public IP or site-to-site VPN.

Right-size virtual machines via vertical scaling and scale out with horizontal scaling by adding instances behind a load balancer in an availability set for stateless workloads sharing a data set.

Create a virtual machine scale set to automatically scale instances based on demand, using managed or unmanaged options, load balancing, and auto scaling with min and max limits.

Protect your Azure virtual machine by configuring network security groups and inbound rules, controlling ports like RTP, and applying them to NICs or subnets for centralized firewall management.

Azure enables deploying virtual machines with pre-configured B-M agents or extensions, such as puppet or chef, to automate setup during deployment via power shell desired states configuration.

Learn to monitor Azure virtual machines using metrics, alerts, and diagnostics in the portal; configure activity logs, dashboards, and automated responses to maintain performance and connectivity.

Compare classic versus resource manager deployments for virtual machines, and learn how cloud services with a virtual IP provide public endpoints, DNS names, port mappings, and optional load balancing.

Review Azure virtual machines, deployment models, and sizing, and learn cost estimation and right-sizing. Explore availability sets and scale sets, disks, connectivity, security, extensions, monitoring, and classic deployment caveats.