Designing solutions for virtual machines

In Azure, you can run both Windows VMs as well as Linux VMs. Virtual machines come in all sorts of sizes and a variety of prices, ranging from VMs with a small amount of memory and processing power for general purposes to large VMs that can be used for GPU-intensive and high-performance computing workloads.

To create a virtual machine, you can choose from a number of predefined images. There are images available for operating systems such as Windows Server or Kali Linux, as well as predefined applications, such as SQL Server images and complete farms, which consist of multiple VMs that can be deployed at once. An example of a farm is a three-tier SharePoint farm.

VMs can be created and managed either from the Azure Portal, PowerShell, or CLI. If you're planning on using PowerShell, please note that there are multiple versions of Azure PowerShell available, and that there is a notable difference between Azure PowerShell, which supports the classic deployment model, and the new Azure PowerShell. To install and configure Azure PowerShell, please refer to the beginning of this chapter.

For the demos in this book, we will be using the Azure PowerShell version that supports the new Azure PowerShell. I strongly advise using this version of PowerShell for all your new deployments and solutions. The classic model should only be used for solutions that have already been deployed using this model previously.

Designing the most effective virtual machine solution depends on a few things, such as deciding which size and series to use, deciding if your VMs need high availability, and if your solution will need to scale up and down easily.