Azure #1 - Create a Windows 2019 VM in Microsoft Azure

This is the first post of an upcoming series for Microsoft Azure.

Assume you've got an Azure subscription account. The next first thing to do is to create a resource group. Login in to Azure Portal page https://portal.azure.com/. Click to create a resource at upper left-hand corner. A "New" page appears in the right pane. Click "Windows Server 2016 Datacenter" to launch vm creation page. This page has many vm related tabs. I'll go over each tab in the following sections.

On the first "Basics" tab, choose subscription. Underneath it either pick a resource group from the drop down list or click on "Create new" to create a new resource group. We are creating a new resource so fill in the pop-up windows with Name "ResGrp_Win2019". Hit OK. 

Next we need to give the VM a machine name. Note there're some restrictions for naming. You'll see them on the right side. I'd like to call it "TstSrvSQL2019_A". Unfortunately it didn't seem to accept underscore inside the name. The guide only says it doesn't allow an underscore at the beginning. More interestingly, the red error message does not sound like an error. If I remove "_" then all is green. I guess we just hit a small bug but let's move on.

Choose a Region from a list of 30+ options. We also want to create an Availability Set. Since no existing set exists we click on "Create new". In the right side pane fill in set name as "Set_Win_US_East" and leave default numbers of machines as is.

Next choose the right size for this VM. Then click OK.

In setting up administrator account, notice you cannot use "Admin" or "Administrator" as they are considered reserved words. For password, it must be between 12 - 123 characters long. So we create  "VMADMIN" to allow RDP access to all VMs we create. Select RDP port to allow inbound traffic. 

So much for the basics. Now click on "Next:Disks >" at the bottom of the page to move on to next section. 

On the "Disks" tab, there're fewer items to choose. We pick Standard hard disks instead of SSD disks. Then switch to networking tab. 

On networking tab, create a new vNetwork. Accept default vnet name. Choose both address space and subnets. Click OK.

Click on "Next:Management >" to move on to Mgt. tab. Accept default account for diagnostics storage. Enable backup. Create a new vault "vault888" and assign existing BackupGrp to it, Use Daily Backup Policy.

Temporarily pick rd as a tag on the "Tags" tab for now. Click "Review + create" to review all settings before creating the actual VM.

At last click on "Create" to kick off the VM building process. A few minutes later the deployment is completed.

Now we need to connect to the VM. On Azure portal page click on Virtual Machines then choose the new VM we just build. You can click on "download RDP file" or use your own RDP file. All we need are the machine's IP address and login name. Please use machine name\login name as the full login.

Upon connection we can confirm the VM specs. Surprisingly it's not Windows 2019 as claimed. It is still Win 2016 image.