From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

Creating an Azure virtual machine

From the course: Career Essentials in System Administration by Microsoft and LinkedIn

Creating an Azure virtual machine

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- [Robert] A great tool for system administrators that are new to the industry would be to have their own test environment where they can install applications, try things out, test them, break them, recreate them, that kind of thing. But you may not have the hardware, software needed to do that. So Microsoft has created a special place for you to create sandbox servers that you can test out. And it's called DevTest Labs. And you can get there by going to portal.azure.com. Make sure you already have an account set up. And then you can get into the DevTest Labs service. You can type search here and type in DevTest Labs. I've already done that. So I have this icon in my Azure services list. So after clicking on that, we see the DevTest Labs. Next, you can create a test lab environment. So before you install your virtual machines, you need to create this environment. And you're started out with this wizard that asks you for your subscription, which you should already have at this point. Now, if you haven't created a resource group, choose to create a new group or choose one that you already have existing. Next, you'll want to put in your lab name. I'll just call this TestLab2. And we're going to choose our location. You hit the dropdown and choose whatever is closest to you. Now, do you want this to be a public environment or a private environment? I'll leave it as public. And I'm going to choose next. Now, we have the option to have it auto shutdown. Now, this can be really handy because if you don't want to leave your virtual machines running, it will automatically shut down at whatever time you'd like specified. And you can also be notified as well. I'm going to leave mine on and choose next. Now, we have the virtual network. So if you'd like a different subnet other than the default 10. address, then you can create a new virtual network and subnet. Another good idea if you're testing things like viruses is you can isolate lab resources here. Otherwise you can click no and you can click next. Tags is just for billing purposes. I'm going to go ahead, click on review and create. Now, if I click create, I will create this DevTest lab. However, it will take about 30 minutes for it to be ready. So I've already pre-created one. I'm just going to go back to Home and click on DevTest Labs. And we'll see the environment I've already created earlier called TestLab. I'm going to click on TestLab. And I've not added in any virtual machines yet. So I'm going to do that now. I'll simply go to where it says add. And here you can see all the different operating systems, and applications, things like that that you can add in. I'm going to choose the Windows 11 Pro. And now, it has the default virtual machine name, which I can change and my username. So I didn't add this in, Microsoft added this in for me. I'm going to leave the username as it is. I'll put in my password. I'll save it as my default password. I'm going to change the size because the size that's been chosen is not supported. Sometimes you'll get that. All you have to do is choose a size that is supported and then you can continue on. Next, you can add in artifacts. I'll click on add or remove artifacts. And all artifacts are are specific applications you want pre-installed with the operating system. We used to call this slip streaming where we have the application or the Windows updates, whatever it is that you want installed with the operating system. And then you can save that operating system for use again in the future that starts out as this baseline. The baseline that has just Windows 11 in this case and maybe we add something like 7-Zip to it. So we click on the arrow for 7-Zip. And then it shows up in the right-hand side. And we can select as many of these different artifacts, which are just really applications or other items that you want pre-installed with the operating system. I'll click okay. And we can see that we have one artifact installed, and click create. At the top, we can see the virtual machine being created. And it'll take a few minutes. And once that's done, you're going to have a virtual machine with whatever artifacts you'd like installed. And you can use that for your sandbox to test out whatever you'd like. Now, if you're a new sysadmin, what's great about this is you can practice being a sysadmin using all these different applications and settings, and not worry about making any mistakes that you can't get out of that would cause problems with the production environment. And you can always go back to the original operating system with those artifacts installed and start over again if you make a mistake that causes the operating system to no longer run. My virtual machine has been created. So I can close that. And I can click on my virtual machines. And there's my virtual machine in the list. Now, I'd like to connect to my virtual machine. So I'll just click on connect. And we're going to see the option to open this connection using remote desktop. So I'll click okay. And I'll click connect. Now, I want to make sure that I use the password that I created during the creation of the virtual machine. I'll click yes to accept the identity and certificate. Now, it's securing my connection and it's opening up the remote desktop into my virtual machine. From here I can go ahead and make changes, install applications, things like that. When you create a production virtual machine in Azure, you get options you don't see in the DevTest site. You get options for high availability, redundancy, drive types, and a firewall for custom production use. For a new sysadmin, the DevTest environment is an excellent tool for training in your new career.

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