So before we get on with the course, I just want to say that the user interface for creating
virtual machines has changed.
So I don't want you to be thrown off from the way that I'm showing it within this course
and the way you might be seeing it yourself.
If you go into create a virtual machine, let's say we choose any of these virtual server...Windows
Server 2008.
We're going to be presented with the new interface, just recently in the last couple of days went
live, at least for me, this new interface for creating virtual machines.
So you can see it has more of a tabular structure across the top than it used to have the wizard
look.
Step one, step two, step three, along the bottom.
In this way, you can kind of flip between the tabs, go back and forth until you're ready
to review.
Okay.
They've also changed the order of things.
You start off talking about your subscription and the resource group.
I can create a brand new resource group.
You can see that it's more of a modal interface.
I click create new, and it just sort of pops up.
This is sort of a new look for the portal, as well.
Give your machine a name and it comes up with these tool tips where it actually tells you
that the machine name must be unique within the current resource group.
So that sort of specifies the uniqueness requirement for this particular field.
The regions now, there are now up to 50 regions of the world, but the thing is, you can't
get access to most of them because the US government has a region, the Department of
Defense has its own region, China is a region, and none of those...you can't really, unless
you're working for the government, you can't really get access to those.
But you still get a couple of dozen of good options here for region.
The region does matter.
If we choose east US as the region, and we go into availability set, you'll see that
the availability zone, which is still in preview.
And so only certain regions have the availability zone option, so if I go into central US, then
I can choose which actual data center within the central region I get to deploy my server
to.
I want to deploy this server in the central US region into availability zone number three,
which is a physical location, a physical building within central US.
One and two are separate locations, and so hopefully there's some increased availability
by deploying your VMs into different availability zones.
We can change our minds in terms of which image.
As you can see here, I have windows and Linux options for choosing the image, depending
on the hardware, essentially.
So I can go from 2008 up to 2016...if I wanted to.
There's also browse all images as well.
This is kind of different.
This change size option, so instead of being able to see as part of the normal flow, the
server size you'll see is not in here.
You'll have to go and say change size and then you're taken into a whole separate thing
here in order to change the size.
Now there are tons of options here, and they've actually changed the way that they are offering
servers to this row format instead of the boxes that were there before.
I like to reduce the number of CPUs to the upper limit, like if I only want up to six
CPUs, that reduces the list considerably.
The other thing is you're only getting the current generation options in this list.
If you want to make a server that matches your previous generation, then you're going
to choose previous generation.
You'll see here because I'm doing availability zone three, then I cannot...this size is not
available in zone three.
So you get some issues when you try to do specific availability zones.
The search box is also handy.
I can choose the b2 size, and just by typing b2, I can sort of see the pricing options,
see the ram, the data disk, etc.
So this interface has certainly changed since the course was recorded.
Username, password, pretty standard.
Setting up your security.
Essentially now by default, there are no inbound ports opened, and you actually have to go
and select if you want RDP or HTTP allowed inbound, then you have to select that in the
creation step, otherwise, I'll still do that in the network security group manually, but
this can be done during the portal.
Of course, if you've got the hybrid benefit, if you have windows licenses available within
your enterprise, you can save a lot of money by applying those windows licenses to Azure
and still have this option here.
So I'm just going to fill out these fields and go on to the next screen.
We've already chosen the premium SSD, which is managed.
We can attach data disks at this point as well.
To be frank, this is starting to resemble the AWS creation process.
Now we can create secondary and third data disks to attach to the machine during the
creation step.
There are virtual networks, so it's going to create a brand new network for us by default,
subnet by default, we're going to get a public IP address.
PIN number security groups are free in the basic sense, but if you need advanced features,
then you're going to need to upgrade to that.
We already said that these are the ports that we want.
Accelerated networking, only certain VM sizes support that, but if you're going to have
multiple virtual machines running on the same network, you may want to have accelerated
networking so that those machines can talk to each other if they need to each other,
at a faster speed.
There's some latency introduced to the way that Azure does networking between virtual
machines on the same network that could be eliminated with this method.
We're going to leave the diagnostic settings by default.
Manage service identity, we can have this machine run under identity that's created
within active directory, so if I turn this on, then Azure's going to create a brand new
identity for this machine in Azure active directory and then we can assign permissions
to that identity, and knowing that this is the identity this machine runs under.
I always like to enable auto-shutdown because these things cost money and I'm in a development
mode.
Obviously, you don't want auto-shutdown in a production sense, but in a development sense,
always good to have this.
We can also set up backups here.
Any kind of extensions, so if you're going to do desired state configuration, we can
certainly get some DSC automation extension etc.
We don't have to worry about that.
Tagging...we've never really talked about tagging this course, but if we wanted to have
a standard set of tags for resources to say that this is development environment when
we're creating production stuff, we can call it production.
That makes it easier to manage resources as well.
And finally, the review screen hasn't changed too much.
We can see here its validation is passed, we know what we're going to pay, it gives
us a summary of everything we've done, and we do have the option of downloading the template
for automation.
So if I click create, this is going to fire off.
So you can see the screen has changed in some ways, hopefully not too hard to navigate.
I'm not going to update the video for the rest of the course yet.
I will eventually, but when that time is right.
Hopefully you're not too worried about that, this is just a little bit difference.
Microsoft really wants you to look at powershell arm templates and sort of the scripting and
automation methods for creating virtual machines and...this portal is great for training maybe
once we get into the dozens of dozens of virtual machines that are required to run our enterprise,
we'll do a lot more things using the APIs.